Nº 4 (2025)

In order to saturate the market with cheap detergents, a number of technologies for their production have been developed since the 1930s, which are still used today, almost a century later. If at the beginning of the path various fractions of hydrogenated vegetable oils and spermaceti of cetacean mammals were used as raw materials for soap production, then from the middle of the 20th century, largely due to the efforts of the scientific community, the development of chemical technologies and organic synthesis, the beginning of the use of petrochemical raw materials was laid. To date, a number of methods have industrial potential: hydrogenation, the Bouvo–Blanc method, the Bashkirov method, the SHOP process and the Ziegler process, as well as technologies for the biosynthesis of high-fatty alcohols from gas chemical raw materials. This work is intended to summarize the accumulated experience of science and industry, consider the existing methodological approaches to the synthesis of high-fatty alcohols from various raw materials, show the advantages and disadvantages of these approaches, and outline the prospects for the use of high-fatty alcohols and by-products of their synthesis in Russia.

The article presents the results of a study of unoxidized and naturally oxidized (weathered) brown and hard coals of early diagenesis, as well as humic (HA) and fulvic acids (FA) obtained from them. Using 13C NMR (CP/MAS) spectroscopy, it was found that the structural-group composition of the isolated HA is determined by the composition of the original coals (R2 = 0.81) and affects the magnitude of biological activity using wheat seeds as an example (R2 = 0.75). The structural-group composition of the isolated FA is weakly related to the composition of the original coals and is more homogeneous. The high quantitative yield and biological activity of HA and FA from unoxidized and oxidized brown coals allows us to recommend them for agriculture. HA and FA from oxidized coals have low biological activity and can be considered as technical reagents.

The combustion behavior of a wet mixture of sludge from a pulp and paper plant and municipal waste is analyzed through complementary experiments. The collected mixed sludge was first naturally dried to decrease its initial moisture percentage to 5–9%. Pure water with mass proportions between 30 and 60% was added to the naturally dried samples to analyze their combustion behavior. Thermogravimetric experiments were carried out on the dried and humidified samples under air and applying heating rates between 5 and 100°C/min. The thermogravimetric profiles and the heat flows of the dried and humidified samples were compared. The CO, CO2, and total hydrocarbons emissions were measured during further combustion experiments carried out under isothermal temperatures of 600, 700, 800, or 900°C.

The kinetics of adsorption of 3,5,6-trichloro-4-aminopicric acid (picloram) on mesoporous activated carbon sibunit was studied. The mass of the adsorbent for effective extraction of picloram from an aqueous solution was determined by carrying out adsorption with different ratios of the adsorbent mass to the volume of the adsorbate solution of different concentrations. It was found that time is also an important parameter for effective adsorption.