Dominant technologies

Ethylene oxide has been produced commercially by two basic routes the ethylene chlorohydrin and direct oxidation processes. The chlorohydrin process was first iatroduced dufing World War I ia Germany by Badische Anilin-und Soda-Eabfik (BASE) and others (95). The process iavolves the reaction of ethylene with hypochlorous acid followed by dehydrochlofination of the resulting chlorohydrin with lime to produce ethylene oxide and calcium chloride. Union Carbide Corp. was the first to commercialize this process ia the United States ia 1925. The chlorohydrin process is not economically competitive, and was quickly replaced by the direct oxidation process as the dominant technology. At the present time, all the ethylene oxide production ia the world is achieved by the direct oxidation process. 

Wafer-based crystalline silicon has been the dominant technology since the birth of photovoltaics. It is abundant, reliable and scientifically well understood, as it has enjoyed the knowledge and technology originally developed for the microelectronics... 

Another way to produce acetic acid is based on a carbonylation of methanol in the so called Monsanto process, which is the dominant technology for the production of acetic acid today [15]. Acetic acid then is converted to VAM by addition of ethylene to acetic acid in the gas phase using heterogeneous catalysts usually based on palladium, cadmium, gold and its alloys (vinylation reaction 3 in Fig. 2) [16] supported on silica structures. 

However, the difficulty in getting full colour and uniform large area coloration, coupled with the cost of manufacture, has meant that liquid crystals have remained the dominant technology into the early years of the 21st century. 

Microfabrication is growing in importance in a wide range of areas outside of microelectronics, including MEMS, microreactors, micro analytical systems and optical devices. Photolithography will continue as the dominant technology in the area of microelectronics for the foreseeable future. Photolithography has, however, a number of limitations for certain types of applications, as discussed in Sect. 3.1. 

D Gel electrophoresis/mass spectrometry (MS) remains the dominant technology platform. 

The dominant technologies (outlined above) utilised to determine biological membrane potentials are optically based and particularly involve fluorescence. Thus spatial imaging is a logical extension of these spectroscopic applications. The use of a modified electrode technology has also been utilized to acquire imaging data in which the electrode is rastered over a cell surface to identify localization of ion transport behaviour and by implication spatial variations of the transmembrane potential... 

It is noteworthy that of all the processes that can be used to convert biomass to energy or fuels, combustion is still the dominant technology. More than 95% of all biomass enei] utilized today is obtained by direct combustion. 

Griffiths JB (1990a) Animal cells - the breakthrough to a dominant technology. Cytotechnology 3 109-116. 

Create engineering solutions beyond current or dominant technologies improve, innovate and invent (technologies) to achieve sustainability. 

The other dominant technology is the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) system, which is a means of amplifying (i.e., rapidly growing) small quantities of bacterial DNA to reach critical mass for analysis. Since characteristic segments of DNA are a form of fingerprint for a microbe, this system is used to expand the quantity of a test substance to a level at which it can be assayed by DNA-sensing technology. 

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