Solvents are used across a large range of industry sectors; the global solvents market is projected to exceed 20MT by 2016 with a value in excess of $5bn in the USA alone. Relative market sizes of individual solvents are changing rapidly, largely due to regulatory and environmental pressures and the increasing cost of petrochemical-based solvents. Many traditional VOC-type solvents are being phased out, presenting an opportunity to introduce superior, “greener” alternatives; the selection of the appropriate solvent from the vast number of possible candidates is key in ensuring optimal process performance.
Legislative, environmental and health and safety pressures, together with the increasing cost of both buying and disposing of petrochemical-based solvents (which constitute >75% by weight of a typical plant’s chemical waste stream), are necessitating the replacement of existing VOC solvents across a wide range of applications. Simultaneously, industry is under constant pressure to innovate to improve performance and international competitiveness. The choice of solvent is critical in determining the efficiency and economics of a solution-phase process, influencing a range of factors including plant size, energy consumption, reaction yields and purification costs.
A huge range of solvents is available, but the investment in determining the right one for any given process has traditionally been extremely low, compared to that devoted to reactor design, catalyst formulation etc.. Few systems for matching a user’s requirements to the properties of the full spectrum of solvents are available and most are of very limited scope and utility; consequently it is often difficult for end users to identify the best candidate solvent for the job, without recourse to expensive, time-consuming and labour-intensive laboratory testing.
TWI combines expertise with access to unique, tried and tested proprietary software for high-throughput screening of solvents against application needs.
TWI does not manufacture solvents and can appraise the market in an independent manner.
No other solvent selection system can screen so large a range of solvents and properties so quickly and in a manner tailored to client’s needs.
In addition, working with TWI provides the opportunity for development of unique foreground intellectual property.
The selection system used by TWI has been successfully used to select or design solvents for a wide range of applications, including the extraction of the valuable antimalarial drug artemisinin, the recycling of waste plastic into pure polymers (HiPerPol), the dissolution of cellulose, the selection of media for non-aqueous biocatalysis and the formulation of environmentally friendly agrochemicals. In each case, the selected solvents outperformed the competition both technically and economically and this has been independently and publicly verified in several cases.
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