A selection of business benefits from CPACT technologies:

• Savings in catalyst usage in a commercial scale fluidised bed reactor ~ £1M / annum (BASF)
• Modified recycling of fluidised bed catalytic reactors ~ £250,000 per bed per annum (Shell Global Solutions)
• Significant savings through enhanced process assurance of chemical reactions (BP)
• Early detection of faulty reactor dosing ~ £250,000 savings per annum (Unilever)
• Detection and diagnosis of a bio-intermediate impurity problem (GSK adopted the use of MSPC).
• Unexplained variability in fermentation production processes, expected benefits ~ £4.5M / annum (GSK).
• Significant soft benefits to NNL/Sellafield Ltd have been realised through the involvement with CPACT, as reported by Carl Steele: "The most important benefit is 'know how' or knowledge transfer. Having links with and access to both academics and consultancy expertise, and continuing professional development (CPD) courses, is essential for applying know how to solve industrial problems. The meetings/seminars and conferences organised by CPACT provide opportunities to discuss challenges/problems and exchange new ideas and innovations. For example:
  • Firstly attendance on a MSPC CPD course enabled me to apply this knowledge on numerous
    occasions to resolve production issues for recovery of plant, helping us to produce an extra 100
    containers and allowed us to increase our pool of certified containers by an extra 200 with business benefits. This represents an additional £1 million of value in terms of reducing lifetime costs for
    additional waste generation and providing additional operational flexibility.
  • Secondly, in terms of networking with experts in process control and measurement, the contact that was established with Tessella through an initial discussion at an APACT conference, has led to Sellafield investing approximately £60 K to develop a new solution for condition monitoring using passive acoustics. Potential savings of circa £6M may be made over the lifetime of the plant.
  • Working with Alan Mason (AJM Consulting) and the MS2 Data Mining Software developed with the support of Julian Morris and Jie Zhang at CPACT Newcastle, will see improvements in process performance equating to circa £500K savings over the lifetime of the plant, possibly significantly more.
  • In process measurement, contact recently with Paul Dallin and Paul Kelly at Clairet Scientific has allowed us to utilise Raman spectroscopy to analyse calcine powder samples with the intention to develop an on-line process measurement technique to measure the product quality parameter of residual nitrate content of calcine. Predicting behaviour in the calcination process, improved process control and opportunities to reduce outages for dust blockage recovery, which accounts for approx 5-10 % of total lost production time, would allow increased throughput and accelerate our lifetime programme, which may be worth several million £ over the existing plant lifetime.
  • Working with Julian Morris has led to the successful grant applications for both a Knowledge Transfer Partnership with Jie Zhang at Newcastle University, part funded by the North West Regional Development Agency, and an EPSRC industrial PhD case award with Suresh Thennadil and Julian Morris at the University of Strathclyde."