730110To design and develop a hydrocarbon and chemical resistant geosynthetic membraneClosedLegacy RDA Grant for R&DInnovate UKEstablished in 1989, ITP is an independent and privately owned limited liability SME company employing 17 people with an annual turnover of£ 4.3 million per annum. We are an established producer of technical textiles, coated & un-coated special fabrics and films with a reputation for technical innovation and professional service. Application driven products are designed, developed and produced for a number of markets including building & civil engineering, chemical protection clothing and defence. State of the art converting lines that include slitting and rewinding, printing and thermal welding provide much of the added value to roll stock produced to our specifications. An integral element of our business plan is continuous improvement, product innovation and market diversification. Our prime objective is to develop innovative added-value products with higher margin opportunities. One of our specialisations is technical that of protective membranes, principally incorporating flame retardancy, moisture control and chemical protection technologies. By far the most technical and profitable products for the company are the chemical resistance membranes produced for chemical protective clothing fabrics, gas suits and military NBC shelters. Our experience in selling radon and methane gas barrier geosynthetic membranes to environmental consultants has identified the need for a new barrier material. Logically, we utilised our expertise with barrier polymers used in chemical protective clothing materials to develop laboratory-scale proof of concept samples of a suitable barrier membrane. Our investigations identified a specific range of hydrocarbons and toxic chemicals that are commonly investigated in environmental protection project risk assessments and our discussions also highlighted limitations in current industry standards and shortcomings in the availability of test data, specifically data that enables engineers to determine the material's predicted useful life. In the normal course of events, contaminated soil is analysed to determine the concentrations of each contaminant. The difficulty for design engineers is in material selection since little relevant chemical resistance data is available for the contaminants in question. Our project is to produce both a product and an all-encompassing solution for specifiers: 1. a task-specific material engineered to be resistant to the specific hydrocarbons and toxic chemicals (Annex 2H); 2. comprehensive test data for durability and chemical resistance (Annex 21); 3. an on-line software for design engineers whereby the contaminants' concentrations can be uploaded to produce a suitability and predicted useful life report. This development project will provide both a suitable barrier membrane and necessary data to address these needs.