Chemical Formulation Research
Avantium offers chemical formulation development and optimization services to the performance chemicals, lubricants, fuels, oil and gas extraction and production industries.
The company's expertise allows it to develop high-throughput performance assays to accelerate product development, map base-line product performance, understand products' rheological properties, screen large libraries of additives to select the best additive package and to screen materials for corrosion resistance.
Avantium has experience applying high-throughput research methodology to a wide range of formulation problems. Its approach comprises statistical experimental design, automated sample preparation, high-throughput performance testing, data analysis and modelling.
Avantium's experts make use of chemometrics and computational chemistry to design the right experiments. The best combination of statistical experimental design, thermo-physical property modelling, QSPR and rational design (e.g. for the optimization of organic additives) maximizes the chance of success.
Avantium's platforms for sample preparation allow for efficiency and consistency in liquid and solid dispensing, temperature control, mixing and parallel pH adjustment. Parallel sample preparation facilitates uniform temperature regulation across samples. It minimizes variation in reagent concentrations (by allowing to dispense reagent aliquots from the same stock solution over a short period of time). Of course it also reduces overall project timelines.
Avantium's specialized formulation testing capabilities include high-throughput rheometry, allowing viscosity or yield point determination for non-Newtonian fluids including slurries.
Results can be delivered as response surface models, allowing subsequent use of numerical optimization to find the best formulation compositions to meet multiple product property targets.
Conventional bench-testing methods are not always suitable for new high-throughput ways of working. However, this should not be a barrier to faster product development. Any client will benefit from Avantium's extensive experience in automation, miniaturization, parallelization and chemometric data analysis. Avantium can often develop new high-throughput alternative assays.