Public Funding for Envea UK Ltd

PCME is a global market leader in the supply of particulate (dust) monitoring instrumentation to industrial plants. PCME seeks to expand into the growing gas emissions monitoring market (£300 m with 6% CAGR driven by increased environmental legislation) and generate a fivefold increase in the company’s turnover within the next decade. Industrial plant operators need products that will facilitate the plant’s compliance with new regulations and there is a clear gap in the market for an affordable gas-analyser that can be deployed “in-situ” (i.e. mounted directly on the side of the stack) and can monitor the required range of multiple species of gas, at low concentrations. PCME aims to launch a suite of products to address this customer need based on the novel configuration of FT-IR instrument (“microFTS”) developed in the Spectroscopy Group of STFC RAL Space. The configuration encapsulates the inherent advantages of the FT-IR technique (i.e. it can simultaneously identify and monitor a wide range of gases) in a ruggedized and compact format that is more practicable than the FT-IR emissions monitoring equipment that is currently available. This is ideal to form the core of PCME’s new gassensing product range and has the potential to transform the field of gaseous emissions monitoring, control and reduction. The microFTS is still at an early stage of technology development and before embarking on a full product development, a demonstrator instrument must be tested and characterised in the laboratory. The objectives of this project are to build and a basic prototype instrument, verify its ability to detect low concentrations of gases, and develop a chemometrics model to analyse the spectral information recorded by the instrument. The success of this project will contribute to the growth of PCME as a business (increasing exports and creating jobs), enable industrial plants to reduce emissions, and realise the commercialisation of UK scientific research.

Awaiting Public Summary