Design into business

Since the earliest days of the process industries, the focal point for production has been the reactor and the catalytic processes that it contains.

Therefore, it surprises many external observers that much of the industry still relies on technology which has essentially been around for centuries, such as batch stirred tank reactors.

The Department of Trade and Industry's Manufacturing Molecules Initiative (MMI) has set out a strategy to address how the industry can improve its performance.

MMI has recently completed its funding allocation giving some £2.5M in grants to nearly 20 projects, some on a LINK-type basis of academic/industrial co-funding. This article highlights the successes of a number of projects supported by MMI, and looks at how recent developments in the chemicals cluster of Faraday Partnerships and the unifying actions coming out of the Business Intensification theme within the activities of the Chemistry Leadership Council will benefit industry.

MMI formulated its strategic framework in 2002 under the leadership of a joint industrial and academic advisory committee, and with the help of its director. This article focuses on the last two of these strands.

One of the first projects to benefit from MMI support was 'Britest': a novel approach to unifying the chemistry and chemical engineering of processes through a qualitative design methodology. This first focuses on analysing reaction scheme fundamentals, then finds the best process and its constituent equipment to achieve the optimal business performance.

The original research for the Britest methodology was supported by the Innovative Manufacturing Initiative for the process industries. The potential industrial benefits were clear at the end of this phase and MMI awarded Britest a technology transfer project to enable the research concepts to be refined into practical tools and to train companies in their application through a series of case studies.

These new process strategies, which promote the required transformation while minimising side reactions and waste, are at the core of Britest's approach and achievements to date include: yield increase from 75 to 95 per cent; tenfold reduction in key impurity; fewer, better experiments needed: smaller, more efficient equipment; lower inventory and dramatic reduction in working capital; and improved safety, health and environmental performance, with a 30 per cent reduction in waste.

During the course of the MMI project Britest became a not-for-profit company.

New technology is often a solution looking for a problem which may not surface for some time. However, James Robinson, a manufacturer of speciality and photographic chemicals and fluorescent, photochromic and hair dyes, had a pressing need to replace an old batch production plant. The existing process involved three multiphase (solid-liquid) stages.

James Robinson wanted a step change in the process which would yield a significant competitive advantage. They quickly identified that some form of continuous intensified process might be the solution.

The work of Xiong-Wei Ni at Heriot-Watt University on the industrial application of oscillatory baffled reactors (OBR) came to their attention and so a 12 month MMI demonstration project was born. The OBR was designed to manufacture the product in one continuous operation rather than the previous three stages. The company has been delighted by the results.

The direct benefits include more consistent product quality, reduced downtime, 27-fold more compact reactor, reduced capital and operating costs as well as safety advantages. Based on the success of this project, Ni has now set up his own company, Nitech Solutions, to offer the OBR technology to other companies wishing to convert from batch to continuous processing.

At a recent SOCSA (Specialised Organic Chemicals Sector Association) 'Emerging Technology Club' meeting on Reactor Technologies both the above projects featured.

One particular issue came from Brian Gourlay of Avecia who highlighted the gap between their processing needs - 90 per cent of their reactions complete in greater than 10 seconds, whereas many intensified reactors focus on less than 10 seconds.

He suggests that there are process needs where there are no clear equipment options at present and that much of the current equipment is not characterised in a way that lends itself to selection.

As noted above by Britest, one of the key areas where significant gains are likely is through a deeper understanding of the reactions, catalytic processes and integrated processing solutions.

This is one area that the new InsightFaraday is looking to advance. This is one of the cluster of Faraday Partnerships which can help the process industries. It focuses on high throughput technologies (HTT) for product and process development.

Recently, a group of industrialists visited Switzerland and Germany to learn how they were developing and applying HTT in the process industries. The group will launch a report on this visit at a workshop in February at UMIST, which will also include presentations and exhibitions from some of the overseas organisations visited.

The mission team were impressed by the extent to which HTT is being applied in process development including catalysis and process optimisation. For example, Bayer Technical Services has recently made available a six-reactor HTT unit which can cover a broad range of operating conditions and enables high quality reaction and process data to be generated rapidly using multiple probes.

Such HTT systems are supported by intelligent software for design of experiments and data analysis.

In the UK, Simon Waldram of HEL Ltd is leading a collaborative project under MMI on producing high quality kinetic data from a limited number of calorimetric tests.

At a higher level, the Innovation Group of the new Chemical Industries Association's Chemistry Leadership Council is building on the work of the DTI-supported Chemicals Innovation and Growth Team. Led by Brian Murphy, managing director of speciality chemicals producer Robinson Brothers, the CLC is promoting a business intensification theme to integrate all the key elements of better processing, within a business context.

This success of this more aligned approach of the best on offer in the UK and internationally offers the prospect of a rosy future for the UK process industries.

Richard Bahu is MMI coordinator for InsightFaraday, and managing partner of The Oxis Partnership.