Research/development incentives

Over a number of years, the photovoltaic cell developers received large financial incentives from the U.S. government, For example, the National Photovoltaics Act of 1978 was passed by the IT.S. Congress, which authorized an expenditure of 1.5 billion for research, development, and demonstration of solar cell systems for converting sunlight into electric power, Also, in connection with the Federal Non-Nuclear Energy Research and Development Act of 1974, which established the concept of net... 

Likewise, fly ash from power plant combustors often contains small amounts of metals or their oxides, which require costly disposal in the ever-shrinking number of approved hazardous waste landfills. Thus, there are economic incentives to recover the metal values as well as to reduce the costs of ultimate disposal. Here, too, the metal content is low, and research is needed to develop economical separation processes. In principle, advances in this area could be translated into recovery of metal values from mine tailings. 

When one takes the cost of industrial compliance with RCRA to handle currently generated wastes and adds the cost of Superfund to clean up the wastes of the past, it becomes obvious that there are strong incentives for technology development in the area of waste minimization and treatment, and many opportunities for research and employment for chemical engineers. 

For similar motivations, there are limited incentives to develop an alternative SCR process for stationary sources based on methane (CH4-SCR) or other HCs, or based on NTP technologies, if not for specific, better applications. The situation is instead quite different for mobile sources, and in particular for diesel engine emissions. The catalytic removal of NO under lean conditions, e.g. when 02 during the combustion is in excess with respect to the stoichiometric one (diesel and lean-burn engines, natural gas or LPG-powered engines), is still a relevant target in catalysis research and an open problem to meet future exhaust emission regulations. 

Thus, brands allow product differentiation, which, according to market theory and empirical evidence, results in a higher price than would be the case with perfect competition. Yet whereas patents provide rewards and incentives for those companies that assume the economic effort and the risk involved in research, brands benefit any company that has the wherewithal to develop effective marketing strategies and give doctors incentives to prescribe its products, regardless of their therapeutic value and the possible research orientation of the firm. 

Methods for determining acrylonitrile in environmental samples are quite good. It may be assumed that the normal incentives for both research and the development of commercial methods of analysis will result in new analytical methods for acrylonitrile that have improved sensitivity and selectivity. Degradation products of acrylonitrile in environmental media are difficult to determine. This difficulty is not as much an analytical problem as it is a problem of knowing the fundamental environmental chemistry of these compounds in water, soil, air and biological systems. 

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