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Corterra
Have you heard the story about the magic carpet? Joe Powell, Shell’s Chief Scientist – Chemical Engineering, has. He helped write it. The story is about polytrimethylene terephthalate, or PTT, a type of polyester that can be spun onto a range of fibres and yarns. And which many people already knew would make a better carpet and fabric alternative than regular polyester or nylon.
A key ingredient of PTT however, is 1,3-propanediol (PDO) - an ingredient very expensive to produce using traditional technology. Over the years, many had failed at attempts to find alternative low-cost ways of producing PDO since PTT polyester was first discovered more than four decades ago.
The basic problem was that the process being used to produce PDO was fundamentally flawed – it simply wouldn’t work on a continual, commercial scale.
As a process development engineer for Shell Chemicals, Powell and his team were given the task of finding the solution. The team included all the right ingredients - experts from fields such as organo-metallic chemistry, carbonylation chemistry, engineering, reactor design, extraction and separations.
Over the next five months they applied smart thinking and lots of experimentation. And eventually, they found the answer - a new and better way of producing PDO.
Their solution was based on a continuous ethylene oxide (EO) hydroformylation using a soluble catalyst. It also involved improvements to catalyst use, enabling far higher yields. Now named ‘Corterra’, the final product is a thermoplastic and belongs to a class of polymers called aromatic polyesters. It can be spun into fibres and yarns and can be used in carpeting, textiles and apparel products. Compared to other synthetics like nylon and polyester, Corterra fibres are longer lasting, softer, easier to dye, and also have better stretch. Some people have called it the fibre of the future.
And that’s the story about the magic carpet, made from PTT containing a vital ingredient, that many scientists concluded (for more than forty years) was impossible to produce commercially. But not Joe Powell and his team whose innovation and tenacity shows that there is a bit of magic in carpet after all.
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