Background
Interface has a strong track record of successfully matching businesses to academics with an overall aim of enabling companies to be more competitive in national or global markets. Innovation can lead to transformation within an industry sector, not only for individual businesses but also for groups of businesses working together to address common challenges.
Many economic reviews, testimonies and new and existing interactions demonstrated that facilitating opportunities for academics to work with groups of companies is an effective way of increasing the impact and reach of innovation on the Scottish economy.
Introduction
The Resource Efficiency Industry Advisory Group for Food & Drink (REIAG) was set up in 2012 as a result of a partnership between Interface Food & Drink, Zero Waste Scotland and the Food and Drink Federation (FDF) Scotland. The aim was to raise awareness and promote opportunities related to environmental sustainability and to stimulate innovation in the food and drink industry.
The membership comprises of 25 prominent Scottish food manufacturers of all sizes and food types, from bakers to brewers and fish processors to fruit growers. The group has a flexible structure where members attend meetings and participate in collaborative projects with academic partners depending on the theme and its relevance to their own business challenges.
Challenge
The Scottish Government’s new Circular Economy Strategy has set ambitious goals such as the new food waste reduction target. There is a need to change the way things are currently done from developing new processes to changing the culture of the workforce, so innovation is key in meeting these targets. Measures to reduce and reuse energy and waste support companies to improve efficiencies in a sector where in general, prices are remaining competitive but costs are rising. The sector has become increasingly competitive but can’t just rely on developing new products and markets to flourish and achieve the ambitious target of £30bn in revenue for the Scottish food and drink industry by 2030.
Solution
The aim of the REIAG is to drive activities which will improve the environmental sustainability of the businesses and the wider industry. This is achieved through delivering innovation projects with academia, learning journeys and by providing a forum for direct interaction between businesses and experts to share best practices in issues such as waste, water and energy efficiency. Companies with a common purpose are encouraged to collaborate around innovation and can gain easy access to academic and business expertise in a nurturing and supportive environment.
Key outcome
A selection of impactful projects are listed below which have de-risked early stage concepts, providing independent evidence of new ways to enhance the sustainability of the Scottish Food and Drink Industry.
Bacterial removal from recycled water – Shellfish Processors
This project was led by the Scottish Shellfish Marketing Group who collaborated with the University of Edinburgh and the James Hutton Institute to carry out research into the effectiveness of UV lighting to kill bacteria in the wash process and by doing so to increase the number of times the water can be recycled. This has led to a further project using UV and filtration techniques to further enhance the water treatment system.
Heat recovery
This feasibility project was carried out with one of the large companies in the group and Edinburgh Napier University to recycle heat required in the drying process. By deploying the outputs of the project in house, savings of £600,000 a year are forecasted. In addition, the results were disseminated to the other members of the group to explore the viability and application for their own business.
Bio-treatability of food industry effluents
This project was a collaboration with the University of Aberdeen on bio-treatability of waste effluent with six of the companies providing quantitative data and a deeper understanding of what their waste could generate in value whether through anaerobic digestion or other processes. This led to the Scottish Salmon Company winning an Interface Food & Drink competition to undertake more in-depth work with the University assessing viability and return on investment for converting their waste effluent into energy and by-products. The company now have the data to make a commercial decision on investing and integrating the processes across their Scottish operations, which has saved them considerable resource, both staff and financial.
Business benefits
By working together, groups of companies can share best practice, partner on projects of scale with a broad range of academics and industry experts and access funding that encourages new ways of collaborating.
Les McArthur, Operations Director at Dean’s of Huntly commented:
The group provides an excellent platform to work together, sharing knowledge and experiences which, along with technical expertise brought in by the organisers, allows us to develop and implement new sustainability measures in our businesses and saves us time and money. These measures range from high to very low cost so there is something for every type of business. The merit of being able to meet with your peers is also invaluable as we can discuss and collectively solve issues. Many of the topics covered can then be supported by onsite surveys meaning that only some time needs to be invested to establish if a particular topic can save your business money whilst also becoming more sustainable.
Academic benefits
The benefits for academia gained are also significant, including establishing new areas for research and knowledge exchange, collaboration with other academics across other disciplines and institutions and greater visibility of academia to industry.
Professor John Currie, Director of the Scottish Energy Centre at Edinburgh Napier University added:
“Edinburgh Napier University and the Scottish Energy Centre have benefited enormously from our involvement in groups such as the Resource Efficiency Industry Advisory Group and the Scottish Craft Distillers Association. Through Interface, they have provided us with the opportunity to work in collaboration with a variety of companies and bring academic thinking to real-life industry challenges.”
Background
Whilst two and a half times more heat is consumed than electricity globally, new developments in heat have not been the focus on considerable innovation in recent years.
Sunamp Ltd, which is based in East Lothian, was founded in 2005 by successful technology entrepreneur, Andrew Bissell, who wanted to produce an innovative solution to develop heat batteries that store energy as heat, which can be released on-demand to provide heat and hot water.
Challenge
As over half the world’s population live in densely populated cities and countries there is a clear need for heat energy stores in homes to move beyond gas and for homeowners to adopt solar and heat pumps without compromising on space requirements. Therefore Andrew set out to develop a truly practical heat energy store that was much more efficient and compact than hot water tanks and physically small enough for people to easily store in their homes.
Sunamp’s innovative idea was to create heat storage systems, using Phase Change Materials (PCMs) that are capable of storing and releasing heat as they change phase. In this way excess energy, which would normally be wasted, can be stored as heat for later use. The patented, non-toxic Sunamp Heat Battery stores and provides heat to warm a building or deliver hot water. The energy is released in much the same way as a hand warmer works.
The issue that Sunamp faced with PCMs is incongruent melting, which affects the PCMs ability to store and release heat over a long lifetime. As a consequence, this was hampering the performance in Sunamp’s heat batteries.
Solution
Through Interface, Sunamp was successfully matched with Colin Pulham, Professor of High-Pressure Chemistry and Head of the School of Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh, to analyse the PCMs to develop systems that store renewable energy as heat. They did this by developing additives, which would reduce the effects of any incongruent melting and, therefore, significantly improve the PCM’s heat storage properties. This initial project was funded through a Scottish Funding Council Innovation Voucher and although provided some early results, it was only in the close out meeting that the discussions led to further areas to be investigated. The resulting project proposal was successfully awarded an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Case studentship which subsequently resulted in the PhD student upon graduation joining the Sunamp team as their Materials Scientist.
Benefits
Since the initial partnership that Interface brokered with the University of Edinburgh in 2008, Sunamp has continued to develop their relationship with Professor Pulham and commenced a new relationship through Interface with Dr Tadhg O’Donovan, School of Engineering and Physical Sciences; Mechanical, Process and Energy Engineering at Heriot-Watt University. The value of the relationship between University of Edinburgh and Sunamp has supported career development and employment for post graduate and undergraduate students, a new area of research into phase change materials, leveraged several £100k of funding and facilitated access to facilities such as the Diamond Light Source UK facility. The collaborative partnership will be submitted as an Impact case study to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021 highlighting the significant benefits that have been realised.
Professor Colin Pulham stated:
Follow on Projects
Under an Energy Technology Partnership (ETP) student agreement two significant discoveries in relation to Sunamp have been published. Professor Pulham now has a Sunamp focussed team working within the University and some of the collaborative projects have secured EPSRC Impact accelerator and Innovate UK funding.
In 2014 Sunamp secured a Knowledge Transfer Partnership with Heriot- Watt University which aimed to integrate and optimise Heat Batteries with Solar Thermal and Solar Hybrid PV-T (Photovoltaic-Thermal) Panels to develop a competitive, on-demand heat supply solution for domestic households.
In April, 2016, Sunamp raised £3.2m for its sales and manufacturing function in its latest funding round led by an international private investor in the energy market.
“The global thermal energy storage market is expected to reach $1.8 billion by 2020 and we are excited about the potential of our product to solve a worldwide problem,” said Chief Executive, Andrew Bissell.
In August 2017 a consortia, which includes Professor Colin Pulham with Sunamp and Vantage Power, was awarded £250k from Innovate UK for a project that will look to develop a novel vehicle thermal management solution that addresses hybrid electric bus cabin warm up and thermal loads in stop/start and all electric modes.
In 2017, Sunamp and the University of Glasgow’s School of Engineering partnered on a £2 million project linked to clean power and heat generation from the China-UK Research and Innovation Bridges programme, a joint UK/China initiative under the Newton Fund, developing solutions for agri-food, energy, healthcare, and urbanisation.
Andrew Bissell from Sunamp and Prof Pulham from the University of Edinburgh’s School of Chemistry won the Powerful Partnership Award at the Scottish Knowledge Exchange Awards 2019.
Sunamp signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Chinese company Trina Solar, the world’s largest solar solutions company. Trina Solar aims to jointly address the 66m Chinese homes that are heated by coal, converting instead to solar PV-powered heat pumps backed up by energy storage in Sunamp heat batteries so heat is available whenever needed. The excellent performance, quality and stability of the PCM developed early in the University of Edinburgh/Sunamp partnership was foundational to Trina selecting to work with Sunamp. There is potential for very large orders benefiting Sunamp, University of Edinburgh, the inventors and the UK and Scottish economies, and also benefiting the environment via decarbonisation and improved air quality.
The company also secured £2.2 million in funding from Japanese energy provider Osaka Gas.
Sunamp also signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Jiangsu Gomon Renewable Energy Development Co which aims to create an “innovative and unique” heat pump water heater for household use. The partnership aims to develop an innovative and unique heat pump water heater for the residential market, using Gomon heat pumps and Sunamp high energy-density, high power-density Heat Batteries.
Watch the interview with Professor Pulham and Andrew Bissell here:
Please note that Interface administers the Innovation Voucher Scheme on behalf of the Scottish Funding Council. All funding applications are reviewed on a case-by-case basis by the Scottish Funding Council, guidelines can be found here.
Background
Stuart Speake founded Soltropy Ltd in 2012 to bring to market an innovative solar thermal panel system.
Solar thermal heating systems reduce CO2 emissions by displacing the use of fossil fuels. According to the Energy Saving Trust (EST), a solar thermal panel saves between 230kg and 510 kg per year depending on which fuel it is displacing.
Most solar thermal systems have a separate antifreeze filled loop for protection against freezing and require a new tank fitted with a heat exchanger. When retrofitting, a perfectly good tank (usually copper) needs to be replaced. The Glasgow‐based company, Soltropy Ltd, has developed an innovative solution that allows the fluid in the panels to freeze without causing system damage, allowing the system to be set up to heat water directly, negating the need for a new hot water tank and potentially reducing the system cost by 50%.
Challenge
The company was looking for academic expertise to provide solid data on the overall system performance.
Solution
After hearing about Interface at an event, Louise Arnold was able to put the company in touch with Dr Tadhg O’Donovan from the Energy Academy at Heriot Watt University. Thanks to the University’s support, Soltropy was awarded a £5,000 Scottish Funding Council Innovation Voucher, administered by Interface, which helped to offset the cost of the project.
The project is now finished with the software model developed. This has proved to be very useful to the company, indicating clear areas where the design can be modified, resulting in different characteristics.
Follow On
This collaboration lead to a grant of £6.5 K from the ETP consultancy fund being secured to build a prototype and carry out comparison testing with an incumbent solar thermal system. Testing was carried out at the Heriot-Watt University Renewable Energy Test site with the installation of two evacuated tube solar panels. One panel was modified to incorporate the Soltropy technology; with instrumentation installed to measure fluid flow rates and fluid temperatures so as to determine an accurate thermal performance for the duration of the project. The work was carried out by two Mechanical Engineering students, funded by student bursaries, as part of an MSc programme in the School of Engineering and Physical Sciences.
In December 2014, Soltropy, along with project partners Heriot-Watt, succeeded in securing Innovate UK (formally Technology Strategy Board) funding with a grant of almost £175k as part of the Early Stage Energy Catalyst.
Tests at Heriot‐Watt University have shown that the Soltropy system behaves differently from the “old style” systems and requires a different control strategy. The main aims of the year long project is to investigate what type of strategy would be appropriate along with some new innovations to further reduce the cost of the system. The project partners have received a grant of £90k which will fund a Research Associate full time, and ultimately extend their collaborative project.
Benefits
Soltropy Ltd has benefited from the collaboration with a more optimised system through theoretical modelling. It now has data to back up claims it will make when convincing potential investors and, ultimately, installers and consumers, of the superiority of the system.
The initial project brought the University increased understanding of solar thermal systems and gave them the opportunity to work with Soltropy under a larger funded programme to further develop the project.
As this system will be manufactured in Scotland and sold worldwide, the Scottish economy will benefit from an increase in employment and revenue.
“Interface has helped immensely with my journey from my initial idea to a validated tested product. They were the initial help in partnering us up with academia to help in taking it from this idea, through software modelling and then actual lab and onsite testing.” Stuart Speake, Soltropy
“I can honestly say that without Interface I doubt that my innovation would have gotten off the ground” said Stuart after winning the Sustained Partnership award at the 2016 Scottish Knowledge Exchange Awards.
Updates
In June 2016, Soltropy were awarded the £100k Scottish Edge Higgs award.
Higgs EDGE is a special award aimed at entrepreneurs who have a company that has applied leading edge technology to an innovative product, or product under development in the Science, Technology or Engineering sector, which is potentially world leading and also has the potential for large scale global commercialisation.
Soltropy also received an Energy Technology Partnership fund of £6.5k to build a prototype and carry out comparison testing with an incumbent solar thermal system.
Two further projects involving Soltropy have recently been funded by the Innovate UK Energy Catalyst scheme:
1. Reducing the Cost of Solar Thermal: Integrating a Novel Freeze Tolerance Approach with Flat Plate Solar Thermal Panels
2. Reducing the Cost of Solar Thermal: Integration of Thermal Storage with Solar Collector Design
The combined funding for each of these projects totalled £200k.
Please note that Interface administers the Innovation Voucher Scheme on behalf of the Scottish Funding Council. All funding applications are reviewed on a case by case basis by the Scottish Funding Council, guidelines can be found here.
Martin Energy Limited was established in 2004 to develop novel ways to reduce energy costs and improve the environmental performance of the electricity industry. The company has recently re-branded and is now known as Flexitricty.
The Business Challenge
Flexitricty is, in effect, a “virtual” power station – a low carbon resource of reserve electricity which supports the National Grid by running generators and reducing consumption when the national electricity system is under stress. Due to the nature of the business, it operates on a 24/7 basis.
Partners
The company prides itself on being a ‘knowledge business’ and places great importance on its highly qualified and experienced staff, so working with university academics is central to the company’s growth strategy as Flexitricity’s managing director, Alastair Martin, explains.
“We had researched all the various government-backed schemes, grant aided assistance and other options to engage the services of a university partner to help our research and develop plans, but the complexities of unravelling the most appropriate scheme and the most suitable university to work with was time consuming. However, when we met with the Interface team through a contact at Scottish Enterprise, we knew from the initial conversations that they could distil this to meet our requirements.”
The Solution
Interface – The knowledge connection for business helped broker collaborative links with two academics from the University of Edinburgh’s School of Engineering and Electronics, Dr Dimitri Mignard and Professor Dr Gareth Harrison.
The collaboration is working well. Flexitricity was successfully awarded a two year Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) to explore ‘the supply and demand balancing in the National Electricity System and has now employed a KTP Associate to fulfill the terms of the KTP agreement.
Alastair adds; “I worked for large power generation operators for a number of years and more specifically high energy fossil fuel generators. I soon realised that it was possible you can have efficiency within an electricity generation plant, but that is often at the expense of flexibility. It would appear you cannot have both. However on the energy consumption side, there is a lot of flexibility with no efficiency penalties, so Flexitricty was borne out of the potential to harness this.
I realised that what was needed was as an efficient way of managing the process as a real time operational system and that’s precisely what we have done with Flexitricity”.
Dr Gareth Harrison comments;
“We are now working our way through the KTP in collaboration with Flexitricity and I’m delighted to say the synergy within this partnership between Flexitricity and ourselves is very complimentary. The academic capability within the university’s energy and engineering departments are looking at ways of developing new systems with Flexitricity which will help enhance the efficiency of matching electrical consumption to the supply/demand balance.”
Follow-On Activity
Flexitricity are currently (March 2019) involved in the Smart Hubs demonstrator project which will also use vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology to enable cars to deliver electricity back to the smart grid. The project, which will look at integrating “various battery storage options”, would allow large numbers of electric vehicles to be charged without placing further pressure on an already-constrained grid.
Kanthal is the world’s leading manufacturer of resistance heating elements offering a broad spectrum of products for use in domestic home appliances to large high temperature furnaces. The company has a production unit in Perth and forms part of the multi-national Sandvik Group, a high-technology engineering group and one of the world’s largest manufacturers of resistance and electrical heating element materials.
Kanthal has manufactured silicon carbide heating elements for many years with two types – recrystallised silicon carbide and reaction bonded silicon carbide – dominating its product range.
The Business Challenge
Industrial users of silicon carbide heating elements place a great emphasis on the strength, and in particular, the bending strength of silicon carbide heating elements to offer greater robustness and versatility within the manufacturing process.
Stan Moug, Product Development Manager, Kanthal explains, “bending strength plays a key selling point for the company, particularly when vying for international business against strong competition in the USA and Japan.”
Strength of product is not just a requirement in the manufacturing process, but also in the global transportation and shipping of the product. For example, increasing demand for display glass used for applications such as plasma display panels, require longer and larger element lengths – anything from 2.5 to 3 metres are the norm, but longer rods, up to six metres in length are being demanded as the size of the panels used increases. Therefore, we have to be in a position to offer products that withstand the rigours of transportation and reach the manufacturer or specifier in one piece.”
Whilst Kanthal was able to carry out some areas of testing capability in-house, the company needed to conduct specific bending trials which measured the accuracy in three and four point bending strength of silicon carbide rods with diameters ranging between 20mm and 55 mm. This required fully calibrated materials testing equipment which gave accurate results. The fact that the measurements could be seen as impartial and independent was also seen as an advantage.
Kanthal initially contacted Scottish Enterprise Tayside, who referred the enquiry to Interface – The knowledge connection for business.
The Solution
Interface sourced assistance from across the Scottish academic community and made recommendations to Kanthal. The company opted to work with the School of the Built Environment at Napier University.
The academic, Alan Davidson, Lecturer in Materials Engineering, worked with Stan at Kanthal to evaluate the bending strength of the silicon carbide rods. A number of tests on over 300 rod samples were carried out and both Alan and Stan believed the results gave Kanthal encouragement to conduct further research into the manufacturing process of future silicon carbide rods.
Stan concluded, “Our industry is continually evolving and we need to look at ways of keeping ahead of our competition. Working with Napier University, with the help of Interface, has been a very worthwhile exercise and the working partnership we now have with Alan Davidson is proving very successful.”
“Personally, I found Interface very helpful. They asked the right questions and made sure they captured our specific requirements. Our search criteria can be very specialised and Interface managed to identify the best solution, on our behalf, before we commenced our partnership with Alan Davidson at Napier. This saved us a lot of time”.