Public Funding for Hel Limited

Oxidation is a common synthetic transformation in the chemical industry, but it often involves the use of toxic, environmentally unfriendly and expensive heavy metal oxidants. An alternative that is often used on small scale is to use ozone, although the risks inherent with scaling up such a process (thermal instability of the reaction intermediates leading to highly exothermic decomposition) have rendered this approach unscalable. This project, a collaboration between leading UK universities and companies, will deliver a safe and scalable method of performing kilo-scale ozonolysis in a continuous manner and demonstrate its utility via application to an existing drug compound. Additionally, by using a fully sustainable starting material (ozone is generated from oxygen in the air), we will demonstrate sustainable manufacturing approach with significant reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, which will be broadly applicable to the UK chemical manufacturing sector.

This consortium combines the original technology inventor in Cranfield University, with a pre-pilot reactor developer (HEL Ltd) and a sustainable and renewable process design/assessment specialist (Exergy Ltd) to explore a novel, new and emerging technology, called thermoelectric promotion of catalysis (TEPOC). In essence, TEPOC uses thermoelectric materials to transform a temperature gradient into a Seebeck voltage, which increases the electrochemical energy of the electrons in the catalyst particles. This improves the catalytic activity by several tens to several thousands of times. The generic nature of the mechanism suggests that TEPOC can be applied to many catalytic chemical processes to: reduce the reaction temperature, increase the reaction speed, improve the desired selectivity. The use of the thermoelectric effect to boost catalyst performance has potentially wide ranging benefits for the chemical industry in terms of both efficiency savings and enabling the use of chemical syntheses which have not previously been viable.