Business Roundup

Tri Chemical Laboratories will produce high-purity chemicals developed by JSR that will then be supplied to manufacturers of electronic components. The Japanese companies say Tri-Chemical will initially supply JSR with a chemical vapor deposition precursor that is still under development.

Rohm and Haas has formed a partnership with NaturalNano, a Rochester, N.Y.-based materials science company. Rohm and Haas will fund two research projects studying the use of NaturalNano's halloysite natural tube nanomaterials to make polymers stronger, lighter, and more flexible.

Siam Styrene Monomer, a 50-50 joint venture of Siam Cement and Dow Chemical, will spend $90 million on a previously announced propylene oxide plant in Map Ta Phut, Thailand. The 390,000-metric-ton-per-year plant will implement a Dow/BASF process that makes use of hydrogen peroxide and propylene as raw materials.

Asahi Kasei Kuraray Medical will spend $26 million to expand its capacity to produce dialyzer membranes, made from polysulfone hollow fibers, to 34 million units per year. The company is owned 93% by Asahi Kasei and 7% by Kuraray.

NineSigma, a business-to-academia technology matchmaker, has added Moscow-based International Science & Technology Center to its Innovation Alliance Program. ISTC, the largest sponsor of research in Russia, was founded 16 years ago to provide former Soviet weapons scientists with peaceful research opportunities.

DuPont will more than double capacity for its Solamet thick-film metallization pastes at its plant in Dongguan, in southern China. The material is applied to the front and back of solar cells to increase their efficiency, improve production yields, and lower material consumption, DuPont says.

LyondellBasell is closing a polyolefins sales and applications center in Auburn Hills, Mich., and relocating to an expanded center in Lansing, Mich. The company is also closing a polypropylene compounding facility in Grand Prairie, Texas, and moving production to Mansfield, Texas, and Altamira, Mexico.

WuXi PharmaTech, the Shanghai-based contract research firm, has signed a new three-year agreement with AstraZeneca to synthesize compounds according to AstraZeneca's designs. WuXi says it recently finished a two-year, $14 million contract to provide the British firm with more than 100,000 compounds.