Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) services

The CPI Sustainable Engineering team is able to utilise its extensive experience of process modeling and process engineering to help review the feasibility of your process and accelerate the path to commercialisation.CPI has worked with several venture capitalists and large companies to assess University and SME technologies of interest, helping these partners reach a go/no-go decision on new technologies and investments.

By tapping into the experience of our specialist technologists and operation staff, CPI can assess how your laboratory process will perform at large scale, and provide a review of the scale up challenges you are likely to encounter along the way.By evaluating your experimental data we can look at process yields and estimate economic viability. We can also calculate if yield improvements from process changes and optimisation are likely. Fundamental scale up challenges can be spotted early on, and alternative processing methods or technology selections can be suggested to mitigate scale up risk.

CPI appreciates that companies may already understand which unit operations make up their process, but are also aware that these need improving, or require help to identify missing links in your process flow. CPI can also help companies seeking a new technology that can add novelty to your process and which can improve process efficiency or product quality.

As the security of fossil fuel supply diminishes and the cost of carbon taxation becomes an increasing burden, companies are investigating more sustainable alternatives to fossil fuels.CPI has an understanding of the substitution of materials in order to meet logistical requirements identified by companies. This can be through the use of biotechnology and biomass to replace platform chemicals, such as succinic acid; or through thermo chemical routes for conversion of waste to energy, using techniques such as pyrolysis or gasification.CPI can assess selected feedstocks and how they can be utilised. We can also perform the upfront engineering to have a handle on final operational costs and through the use of CO2 life cycle assessments we can confirm the benefits of using the replacement materials.CPI also has the resources to confirm the volumes and amounts of material globally available for use and assess the long term security of that supply.