UK Funding

There are a number of UK organisations providing funding to assist the industrial and research communities to work together on R&D projects in strategically important areas of science, engineering and technology. The main funding is provided by the Technology Strategy Board (TSB), an executive non-departmental public body to drive innovation in the UK. C-Tech innovation is currently involved in 11 collaborative projects funded by the Technology Strategy Board. We have also delivered successful projects for other UK funding bodies, for example the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and Carbon Trust.

Due to our involvement in three innovation-focussed UK networks (Environmental Knowledge Transfer Network, The North West Eco-Innovation Programme, K2i) we are in contact with a large group of innovative companies and research organisations. This helps us to identify the best consortium for a project.

Recent UK collaborative projects include:

• Elendes
  • Electrochemical Enhancement of Nuclear Decontamination Solutions
• Excil
  • Selective Extraction of Valuable Food Processing Components using Ionic Liquids
• Biochemist
  • Biocatalysis and Chemical Engineering for Manufacturing Intensification and Sustainability
• ELSA
  • Electrochemical Enhancement of Fermentative Succini Acid Production
• Reconif
  • This TSB funded project will regard the use of selected deep eutectic solvents and ionic liquids on nickel removal selectivity from different waste streams including filter cakes and battery waste. Initial experiments performed on nickel hydroxide will be studies to understand how effective these new solvents could be on nickel removal and what other physical parameters could maximize nickel release, involving thermodynamic and kinetic techniques.
• Suscorp
  • The project will develop new processes and introduce novel applications for materials that will assist the corporate clothing sector to enhance its competitiveness and reduce its environmental and societal burdens. An estimated 16 million items of corporate clothing that could be reused are currently either sent for disposal or downgraded to low value mixed fibre recyclates. The work will seek to develop two additional new design and disassembly techniques such that they can be implemented at a commercially relevant scale, quality and cost.
• Greywater
  • The project will develop a low cost appliance for the retail sector to effectively treat greywater.
• High Temperature Membranes
  • The development of novel high temperature membranes is of central importance in achieving the goal of proton exchange membrane (PEM) and direct methanol (DM) fuels cells which operate at temperatures above >120 oC. High temperature PEM and DM fuel cells will have greater fuel conversion efficiency, impurity tolerance and robustness, as well as simpler water management issues compared to the current state of the art.
• Micro Porous Metals
  • A technique for development of porous metal foams is being developed, using potassium carbonate as a structure which is subsequently removed. It has the advantages that open cell foam structure can be made from almost any metal with tight control of porosity size and size range, covering porosity levels from 50 to 90%. Typical applications include heat exchangers, electrodes and filters.
• Inboard
  • Technology for embedding enhanced functionality RF-based monitoring and tracking capability into high-value printed circuit boards.
• Lightweight Packaging
  • This project aims to produce novel biocomposite food packaging using plant-based materials including cereal and oilseed straws, with optimised process variables, to obtain ultrathin materials. It will also confirm use of innovative farm-based technologies to convert these materials into retail food packages, at costs competitive with current non-renewable products. The resultant packaging products will be biodegradable /compostable which will lead to a reduction in landfill.
• HiPerPol
  • This project will deliver breakthrough developments in new, low emission, low energy, environmentally benign routes for the treatment of polymer scrap. By using 'highly tuneable' ionic liquids, polymer materials will be specifically extracted from appropriate waste across all parts of the supply chain. The project has 3 strands: treatment of post-industrial composite packaging waste, separation of heavy metal additives from recovered PVC and production of polymer powders from separated polymer waste.
• Reflated
  • The REFLATED process has been developed to treat the waste LCD screens using a novel system of techniques. The process recovers the maximum value from LCD panels; this includes the liquid crystal, indium metal and glass. It is also suitable for integration into current waste processing facilities.
• Redox Batteries / Flow Cells
  • Development of a novel redox flow battery for grid scale energy storage. It does not require a membrane and has only one electrolyte flow circuit reducing cost and complexity. Storage reactions are deposition from solution of lead and lead dioxide.
• Microwave Enhanced Chemical Reactions
  • Microwave chemistry has been used for a number of years by laboratory chemists, particularly in pharmaceutical discovery, to speed up chemical reactions. To date the technology has been limited in scale to equipment capable of producing milligrammes or at most a few grammes of material. This project aims to apply C-Tech innovation’s expertise in microwave engineering to build and validate a continuous flow laboratory system that would be capable of producing kilos of material, which would be readily scalable to produce 100’s of kilos or tonnes. At laboratory scale the reduction in reaction time achieved by using microwaves has been dramatic in many cases, if this could be scaled up to production scale the energy savings would be significant.
• Dragout Reduction
  • In industries such as surface finishing and printed wiring board manufacture, items are processed by immersing them in a series of tanks containing process chemicals or rinse water. This project aims to reduce drag-out losses (process fluid that is dragged out when work is removed from process immersion tanks) by 80%, by developing a prototype enclosure that will hold the items being processed in an atomised mist environment as they leave each process stage and return the collected liquor to the process.
• Butafuel
  • BUTAFUEL will speed up the development of an advanced fermentation process for the production of bio-butanol, a renewable liquid biofuel for transportation. Bio-butanol is a superior "next generation" biofuel that can easily be integrated into the existing fuel infrastructure and blended with both petrol and diesel fuels