A Nottingham chemical manufacturing firm has invested £110,000 into new equipment to accelerate the development of a class of advanced materials that could help tackle climate change.
Promethean Particles has spent the funds on the equipment to analyse how the advanced materials in question, called metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs, behave under different environmental conditions.
The company is pioneering the large-scale manufacture of MOFs, which are tiny crystal structures with extremely large internal surface areas, meaning they can capture and store huge quantities of molecules.
This allows them to be used for a variety of purposes, including storing water and trapping carbon dioxide (CO2) created by the burning of industrial fuels.
The new equipment purchased includes a thermal gravimetric analyser (TGA), which will monitor and record the amount of CO2 the MOFs take up at different temperatures, as well as looking at how their physical properties change when they are heated up.
This information is vital in understanding how MOFs would behave in a real-world application.
Additional equipment now installed at the company will also help the team to understand how the MOFs behave when manufactured in large quantities, so that production processes can be made to be more efficient and cost-effective.
The purchase of the equipment is another significant step for Promethean Particles this year, after appointing a new Board chair and welcoming a new commercial director.
Dr Leah Matsinha, materials development manager at Promethean Particles, said: “MOFs were discovered three decades ago, but while the awareness of their properties and their potential to help tackle climate change has been steadily growing, there is still so much we – as a scientific community – don’t know about how the different types of MOFs behave under various, real-world environments.
“Our work here is cutting-edge and we are pioneering new production techniques, so understanding the potential challenges we would face while scaling up the manufacture of different MOFs, and overcoming these issues, is vital to deploying these materials commercially.
“Previously we would outsource this work but bringing it into our laboratory with these new analytical instruments means we will reduce the time and cost of developing new MOFs.
“What we learn here will add to the growing body of knowledge concerning these fascinating materials, while also enabling us to meet our customers’ needs quicker and, ultimately, manufacture MOFs that are capable of helping us address some of the planet’s most pressing challenges.”
