The Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) is collaborating with UK universities to develop new research and testing capabilities in an effort to advance the manufacture of next generation liquid formulated products.
Advance tech
CPI has worked alongside the Universities of Birmingham, Leeds and Edinburgh, to create an open-access facility designed to enhance SME and larger corporate partners’ product development. The implementation of optimised and controlled manufacturing processes for formulated products has remained difficult within the industry due to cost restraints.
CPI’s digital test-bed hopes to address this issue and will offer partners a time-saving, cost-effective research tool by de-risking innovation through rapid learning and analysis of new, complex liquid processes and technologies prior to capital investment.
Users will be able to learn quickly and efficiently, potentially enabling manufacturing processes that deliver product attributes that are scalable, sustainable and economical. It will also enable companies to understand and control the dynamics of scale-up and scale-down within batch formulation processes and will serve as a test bed for novel sensors and process analytical tools.
The facility consists of a series of scaled vessels, from one litre to 1,000 litres, with a sample flow loop to allow in-line and at-line monitoring of process parameters. It is also highly flexible and can be adjusted to specific project needs, while cutting-edge instrumentation produces data for understanding and predicting product behaviour in-processing.
The equipment will be housed at the University of Birmingham between April and December this year. It will then be moved to CPI to complement their existing formulation capabilities at Sedgefield, and be operational from March 2020 onwards.
Graeme Cruickshank, director of Formulation at CPI, said: “We are delighted to have worked on this novel infrastructure, which will provide SME and larger corporate partners with greater scope to carry out development of next generation products. One of the real benefits of this facility is that it not only provides partners with the opportunity to better understand liquid formulations, it allows them to scale up and scale down their work. It is a real cost-effective, time-saving tool that will ensure the UK’s formulated products manufacturing sector remains at the vanguard of innovation.”