Awaiting Public Project Summary

The project, lead by Syrris, in collaboration with GSK, AMRI UK and the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Continuous Manufacturing and Crystallisation will develop an innovative modular system for continuous chemical processing. It will develop modules that can be used by any chemical industry to perform unit operations such as liquid-liquid, liquid-solid and liquid-solid-gas phase reactions, crystallisations and aqueous work-up in a continuous process, with analysis. The modules will be scalable, easy to use, automatable and able to be quickly reconfigured into hundreds of conceivable single or multi step process systems. Within the project lifetime, this will enable GSK and AMRI to operate more efficient, high quality and sustainable processes with easier scale-up. After the project, commercialisation of these modules will enable the wider chemical process industry to benefit from the same advantages and generate significant exports for the UK.

Chemical processes catalysed with Palladium (Pd) compounds, and based on Nobel-prize winning methods, have become essential for the production of life-enhancing pharmaceuticals & chemicals. These processes underpin global manufacturing worth more than £10billion each year for pharmaceuticals alone. However, the components of the Pd-catalyst must be recovered from the reaction products through further expensive and energy-intensive processing. This project will develop a new 'Catch & Release' technology which can catch the catalyst whilst reaction products are removed, and then release it in a fully-functional active form to catalyse the next reaction. New reaction components are introduced allowing another production cycle to begin. This novel semi-continuous process will be applied initially in the pharmaceutical & agrochemical industries and then developed for other process industries, such as the emerging plastic electronics sector.