Prosperity Partnership in Innovative Continuous Manufacturing for Industrial Chemicals (IConIC)
Lead Research Organisation:
Imperial College London
Department Name: Chemistry
Abstract
Currently, most of the manufacturing the high-value chemicals such as agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals, are performed in 'batch' reactors, where the chemical feedstocks (largely petrochemicals based) are converted into the product through a sequence of 'units of operations', which includes several chemical transformations, and purification steps. As the volume of each reactor is fixed, some of these operations, if not the entire sequence, have to be repeated, in order to meet the market demand. Very often, batch-to-batch variation in quality can result, which has to be monitored closely at each stage of the process in order to meet stringent regulatory requirements for product purity.
Conversely, in a continuous flow process, the individual units of operation are integrated to enable an uninterrupted flow of material and product. Inline analytics (sensors and detectors) can also be implemented to monitor the quality of the produced product in real-time. As the entire process operates non-stop ('steady state'), the volume of production is no longer limited by the reactor size. Potentially, a continuous process is more efficient in saving costs, energy, and time, without comprising product quality.
Traditionally, high-value chemical products, such as agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals, are produced using batch reactors, as they are usually required in small volumes. In more recent years, there are significant economical and sustainability drivers for the chemical industry to adopt the use of continuous flow processes. However, their implementation is not easy; as continuous reactors tend to be less flexible, in terms of modifying them to produce different products. The ambition of the IConIC Partnership is to redesign the continuous process: from a fully-integrated, single-purpose unit, towards a flexible 'plug-and-play' system, where each unit of operation ('module') can be replaced or substituted easily without affecting the overall performance of the continuous process. This will require a better understanding of how the interplay between molecular properties, timescales of reactions (reaction kinetics), and process parameters. For industrial implementation, additional factors (e.g. costs, sustainability and regulatory requirements) also need to be taken into consideration to justify the capital investment needed to switch from batch to flow production.
Over the past 5 years, BASF has been working with ICL to foster an active 'Flow Chemistry' community involving 50 researchers at both institutions. The IConIC partnership will not cement the relationship by initiating a programme of exciting and ambition research projects to translate the benefits of Flow Chemistry from the R&D lab into industrial practice. An important aspect is an emphasis on a seamless data flow and translation process across the WPs, including decision-making under uncertainty, multi-fidelity design of experiments, transfer learning, and proof-of-concept demonstration for scale-up.
A key feature of IConIC is the inclusion of a number of other UK-based industrial partners to form a 'vertical consortium' along the value chain. Over the period of the grant, the Partnership will be expanded to include additional academic and industrial partners at the appropriate junctures, to leverage synergistic values. Ultimately this will enable the UK to take leadership in continuous flow manufacturing.
Conversely, in a continuous flow process, the individual units of operation are integrated to enable an uninterrupted flow of material and product. Inline analytics (sensors and detectors) can also be implemented to monitor the quality of the produced product in real-time. As the entire process operates non-stop ('steady state'), the volume of production is no longer limited by the reactor size. Potentially, a continuous process is more efficient in saving costs, energy, and time, without comprising product quality.
Traditionally, high-value chemical products, such as agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals, are produced using batch reactors, as they are usually required in small volumes. In more recent years, there are significant economical and sustainability drivers for the chemical industry to adopt the use of continuous flow processes. However, their implementation is not easy; as continuous reactors tend to be less flexible, in terms of modifying them to produce different products. The ambition of the IConIC Partnership is to redesign the continuous process: from a fully-integrated, single-purpose unit, towards a flexible 'plug-and-play' system, where each unit of operation ('module') can be replaced or substituted easily without affecting the overall performance of the continuous process. This will require a better understanding of how the interplay between molecular properties, timescales of reactions (reaction kinetics), and process parameters. For industrial implementation, additional factors (e.g. costs, sustainability and regulatory requirements) also need to be taken into consideration to justify the capital investment needed to switch from batch to flow production.
Over the past 5 years, BASF has been working with ICL to foster an active 'Flow Chemistry' community involving 50 researchers at both institutions. The IConIC partnership will not cement the relationship by initiating a programme of exciting and ambition research projects to translate the benefits of Flow Chemistry from the R&D lab into industrial practice. An important aspect is an emphasis on a seamless data flow and translation process across the WPs, including decision-making under uncertainty, multi-fidelity design of experiments, transfer learning, and proof-of-concept demonstration for scale-up.
A key feature of IConIC is the inclusion of a number of other UK-based industrial partners to form a 'vertical consortium' along the value chain. Over the period of the grant, the Partnership will be expanded to include additional academic and industrial partners at the appropriate junctures, to leverage synergistic values. Ultimately this will enable the UK to take leadership in continuous flow manufacturing.
Organisations
- Imperial College London (Lead Research Organisation)
- Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) (Collaboration)
- AM Technology (Collaboration)
- Sterling Pharma Solutions (Collaboration)
- Siemens AG (Collaboration)
- BASF (Collaboration)
- Mettler-Toledo Auto Chem (Collaboration)
- Almac Group (Collaboration)
- Centre for Process Innovation CPI (UK) (Project Partner)
- BASF PLC (Project Partner)
- Almac Group Ltd (Project Partner)
- Siemens Process Systems Engineering Ltd (Project Partner)
- Mettler-Toledo AutoChem, Inc. (Project Partner)
- Sterling Pharma Solutions Ltd. (Project Partner)
Publications

Newton OJ
(2024)
Deconvoluting Substrates, Support, and Temperature Effects on Leaching and Deactivation of Pd Catalysts: An In Situ Study in Flow.
in ACS catalysis
Description | BASF SE PSQ263 Studentship Shivandra Jayasekera PSQ263 |
Amount | £123,473 (GBP) |
Funding ID | PSQ263 |
Organisation | BASF |
Sector | Private |
Country | Germany |
Start | 09/2023 |
End | 09/2027 |
Description | BASF SE Studentship Emma Pajak 2023 |
Amount | £125,870 (GBP) |
Funding ID | PSQ114 |
Organisation | BASF |
Sector | Private |
Country | Germany |
Start | 09/2023 |
End | 09/2027 |
Description | BASF SE Studentship Humza Bhatti PSQ270 |
Amount | £134,972 (GBP) |
Funding ID | PSQ270 |
Organisation | BASF |
Sector | Private |
Country | Germany |
Start | 11/2023 |
End | 10/2027 |
Description | BASF SE Studentship Rebecca Langdon PSQ115 |
Amount | £127,601 (GBP) |
Funding ID | PSQ115 |
Organisation | BASF |
Sector | Private |
Country | Germany |
Start | 09/2023 |
End | 09/2027 |
Description | BASF SE Studentship Toby Boyne PSQ115 |
Amount | £129,325 (GBP) |
Funding ID | PSQ115 |
Organisation | BASF |
Sector | Private |
Country | Germany |
Start | 09/2023 |
End | 09/2027 |
Description | IConIC Prosperity Partnership Consortium |
Organisation | AM Technology |
Country | United Kingdom |
Sector | Private |
PI Contribution | Imperial College will contribute advances hackspace time, 3 phd studentships, PI expertise time and contribution towards MRes tuition fees. |
Collaborator Contribution | Supervision and involvement in the advisory board, placement for students, Industry supervisor time for researchers, 1 FTE programme manager, studentships, consumables for postdocs, travel & accommodation for retreats, software & hardware training, software licences, facility access (Sterling), access to Coflore ACR reactor, hosting pilot-scale trials at MAT with larger Coflore ATR reactor and loaning out production scale Coflore RTR for larger scale tests. |
Impact | No outputs yet |
Start Year | 2023 |
Description | IConIC Prosperity Partnership Consortium |
Organisation | Almac Group |
Country | United Kingdom |
Sector | Private |
PI Contribution | Imperial College will contribute advances hackspace time, 3 phd studentships, PI expertise time and contribution towards MRes tuition fees. |
Collaborator Contribution | Supervision and involvement in the advisory board, placement for students, Industry supervisor time for researchers, 1 FTE programme manager, studentships, consumables for postdocs, travel & accommodation for retreats, software & hardware training, software licences, facility access (Sterling), access to Coflore ACR reactor, hosting pilot-scale trials at MAT with larger Coflore ATR reactor and loaning out production scale Coflore RTR for larger scale tests. |
Impact | No outputs yet |
Start Year | 2023 |
Description | IConIC Prosperity Partnership Consortium |
Organisation | BASF |
Country | Germany |
Sector | Private |
PI Contribution | Imperial College will contribute advances hackspace time, 3 phd studentships, PI expertise time and contribution towards MRes tuition fees. |
Collaborator Contribution | Supervision and involvement in the advisory board, placement for students, Industry supervisor time for researchers, 1 FTE programme manager, studentships, consumables for postdocs, travel & accommodation for retreats, software & hardware training, software licences, facility access (Sterling), access to Coflore ACR reactor, hosting pilot-scale trials at MAT with larger Coflore ATR reactor and loaning out production scale Coflore RTR for larger scale tests. |
Impact | No outputs yet |
Start Year | 2023 |
Description | IConIC Prosperity Partnership Consortium |
Organisation | Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) |
Country | United Kingdom |
Sector | Private |
PI Contribution | Imperial College will contribute advances hackspace time, 3 phd studentships, PI expertise time and contribution towards MRes tuition fees. |
Collaborator Contribution | Supervision and involvement in the advisory board, placement for students, Industry supervisor time for researchers, 1 FTE programme manager, studentships, consumables for postdocs, travel & accommodation for retreats, software & hardware training, software licences, facility access (Sterling), access to Coflore ACR reactor, hosting pilot-scale trials at MAT with larger Coflore ATR reactor and loaning out production scale Coflore RTR for larger scale tests. |
Impact | No outputs yet |
Start Year | 2023 |
Description | IConIC Prosperity Partnership Consortium |
Organisation | Mettler-Toledo Auto Chem |
Country | United States |
Sector | Private |
PI Contribution | Imperial College will contribute advances hackspace time, 3 phd studentships, PI expertise time and contribution towards MRes tuition fees. |
Collaborator Contribution | Supervision and involvement in the advisory board, placement for students, Industry supervisor time for researchers, 1 FTE programme manager, studentships, consumables for postdocs, travel & accommodation for retreats, software & hardware training, software licences, facility access (Sterling), access to Coflore ACR reactor, hosting pilot-scale trials at MAT with larger Coflore ATR reactor and loaning out production scale Coflore RTR for larger scale tests. |
Impact | No outputs yet |
Start Year | 2023 |
Description | IConIC Prosperity Partnership Consortium |
Organisation | Siemens AG |
Department | Siemens plc |
Country | United Kingdom |
Sector | Private |
PI Contribution | Imperial College will contribute advances hackspace time, 3 phd studentships, PI expertise time and contribution towards MRes tuition fees. |
Collaborator Contribution | Supervision and involvement in the advisory board, placement for students, Industry supervisor time for researchers, 1 FTE programme manager, studentships, consumables for postdocs, travel & accommodation for retreats, software & hardware training, software licences, facility access (Sterling), access to Coflore ACR reactor, hosting pilot-scale trials at MAT with larger Coflore ATR reactor and loaning out production scale Coflore RTR for larger scale tests. |
Impact | No outputs yet |
Start Year | 2023 |
Description | IConIC Prosperity Partnership Consortium |
Organisation | Sterling Pharma Solutions |
Country | United Kingdom |
Sector | Private |
PI Contribution | Imperial College will contribute advances hackspace time, 3 phd studentships, PI expertise time and contribution towards MRes tuition fees. |
Collaborator Contribution | Supervision and involvement in the advisory board, placement for students, Industry supervisor time for researchers, 1 FTE programme manager, studentships, consumables for postdocs, travel & accommodation for retreats, software & hardware training, software licences, facility access (Sterling), access to Coflore ACR reactor, hosting pilot-scale trials at MAT with larger Coflore ATR reactor and loaning out production scale Coflore RTR for larger scale tests. |
Impact | No outputs yet |
Start Year | 2023 |
Description | 3rd International Conference on Automated Flow and Microreactor Synthesis (ICAMS-3), joint meeting: Digitalization-driven Transformative Organic Synthese (Digi-TOS) |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Sceintific exchange and networking event |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
URL | https://sites.google.com/view/international-joint-symposium- |
Description | 50th Organic Process Research & Development Conference, Scientific Update |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
Results and Impact | A meeting designed to provide latest scientific updates, specifically for the 'upskilling' of industrial chemists, to meet and network with other chemists. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
URL | https://www.rsc.org/events/detail/75666/50th-organic-process-research-and-development-conference |
Description | New Frontiers in Synthetic Chemistry 2023, Royal School of Chemistry |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | National |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | This event will include several networking opportunities throughout the day, providing an opportunity for all delegates to discuss their research with the aim to stimulate future industry and academic collaborations. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
URL | https://www.rsc.org/events/detail/76136/new-frontiers-in-synthetic-chemistry-2023 |