Comocri clean up with filters

FILTERS developed for marine applications are taking on a new role cleaning everything from vegetable oils in the food industry to wood tars produced in green energy gassifiers thanks to the ingenuity of a Sheffield engineer.

John Beddis spent most of his working life in the oil and then the food processing industries before branching out on his own.

His first aim, after setting up Comocri at the Advanced Manufacturing Park’s Innovation Technology Centre, was to develop a filter for extending the life of vegetable oils.

“The equipment was 99.9 per cent there, when I was seduced by a company within the ITC building that came to me with a problem,” says Mr Beddis.

The company was Tony Fordham’s ITI Energy, which COMOCRI is one of a number of companies that have outgrown incubator workshops at the Innovation Technology Centre.

The company recently moved to the Fusion At Magna development, where it is developing its own test centre to allow it to process samples was developing a plant to turn wood chips into a gas that could be burnt in an engine to generate electricity. ITI needed some way of cleaning the gas which contained considerable amounts of oils and tars.