Carbon Trust awards grant to C-Tech Innovation for chemical energy efficiency project

C-Tech Innovation has been awarded a development grant of £278,000 from The Carbon Trust to demonstrate the potential of energy savings for a range of chemical reactions.

C-Tech Innovation’s expertise in microwave engineering will help build and test a continuous flow, laboratory microwave reactor system that is capable of producing kilogrammes of material per day.

Microwave-enhanced chemistry has been used for a number of years by laboratory chemists, particularly in pharmaceutical discovery, to speed up chemical reactions. However, to date, the technology has only been capable of producing milligrammes or, at most, a few grammes of material.

A key feature of C-Tech’s reactor design is that it is scalable, enabling it to form the basis of future industrial units that will be capable of producing much larger quantities of material, up to hundreds of kilos, or even tonnes, of material per day.

The UK Chemical industry's annual energy usage is currently around 68,000GWh, with a significant proportion of this being used in processes associated with the production of chemicals. Advantages achieved through the use of microwaves can lead to substantial energy savings and, for example, the reduction in reaction time achieved at laboratory scale by using microwave technology has been significant. Moving to industrial scale production can result in dramatic energy savings (up to 90%). Couple this with the added benefit that higher yields can be produced at the same time, the quantity of reactant that needs to be processed can be cut by up to 50%, resulting in further energy savings.