Amsterdam, October 2nd, 2014 – The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) RAMP center based in Melbourne, Australia and Avantium, Amsterdam, the Netherlands announce today a successful first year milestone in their advanced catalyst research on stream.
A major research project undertaken in CSIRO’s RAMP center in collaboration with the Energy and Manufacturing Flagship’s is the development of advanced catalysts. These new catalysts will be developed to reduce the energy footprint of energy intensive chemical transformations including ammonia synthesis and fuel production. In order to achieve their goal of evaluating 200 catalyst formulations per month CSIRO commissioned a highly customized 48-reactor Avantium Flowrence. The acquisition of the Flowrence® technology was made after a thorough evaluation of the solutions available on the market.
Danielle Kennedy, Senior Research Scientist and Team Leader at CSIRO Materials Science and Engineering (CMSE), states: “Right from the outset of the project the Avantium staff was professional and extremely accommodating of our specifications in particular our stringent safety requirements and need to be flexible and access multiple chemistries to allow for future changes in research direction. Besides, the installation went smooth and seamless due to the effort undertaken by the Avantium team assisting us in planning the laboratory design, optimizing our analytical methods and evaluating the functional and chemical performance of the equipment prior to shipping to Australia. Since installation the performance of the Flowrence has exceeded our expectations, allowing us to undertake research which would traditionally have taken 3 years in a single month. Not only is it valuable to investigate more examples of catalyst classes, the sophisticated control system coupled with our safety systems allow us to run 24 hours a day and automatically explore a wide range of process conditions in a single experiment.”
“Given the high quality of CSIRO publications and its challenging research ambitions, we are proud of the decision CSIRO made. We are very pleased to implement our Flowrence technology to meet the research objectives of CSIRO,” says Tom van Aken, CEO at Avantium.
Flowrence technology
Flowrence® technology is the leading technology platform for high-quality testing of whole extrudates and sieve fractions of catalysts. The Flowrence® is used for a broad range of industrial applications that operate in gas, vapour and trickle phases. The Flowrence® parallel reactor system combines the reproducibility and accuracy of larger scale reactors with the countless advantages of small-scale reactors. This technology is a proven leader in the fields of refining, Fisher Tropsch, syngas, green chemistry and many other applications. Broad knowledge of these applications at Avantium combined with the Flowrence® is a powerful cost-efficient method of testing catalysts, and a faster way to bring it to market in R&D laboratories all over the world.
About CSIRO
CSIRO is Australia’s national science agency and one of the largest and most diverse research agencies in the world. CSIRO’s mission is to deliver great science and innovative solutions for industry, society and the environment. CSIRO’s Rapid Automated Materials and Processing centre (www.csiro.au/RAMP) aims to fast-track materials development by employing state of the art methods in materials production and testing.
About Avantium
Avantium is an independent technology company specialized in the area of advanced catalysis R&D and process development for renewable, refinery, energy and chemicals applications. Avantium has demonstrated the value and commercial potential of its unique technology and knowledge by collaborating with leading companies in the energy and chemical industries. For over a decade, Avantium has built up a global customer base for its successful R&D services and systems offering, including market leaders such as BP, Shell, IFPEN, Sinopec, CRI, Sasol and now CSIRO. Avantium’s business unit Catalysis offers solutions ranging from sophisticated R&D systems and services to fully integrated long-term collaborative partnerships. It combines catalytic research based on its Flowrence® technology with a multi-disciplinary team of experts who have the flexible mindset needed to increase research output, improve success rates, reduce costs and accelerate time to market. Avantium’s experts have the skills needed to take catalyst research projects to the next level. Avantium offices and headquarters are based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. For more information, visit the website at www.avantium.com.
