Centre for Formulation Engineering

Our Centre is pre-eminent in the UK for its industry-focused research into the design, manufacture and efficacy of formulated products and intermediates.

These products contain structured solids, soft solids or structured liquids, whose nano- to micro-scale structure are highly process dependent and critical to product function, examples include foods, battery electrodes, pharmaceuticals, paints, catalysts, structured ceramics, thin films and coatings, cosmetics, detergents and agrochemicals.

Our mission is to build co-created research with our industrial partners to speed time to market and reduce waste in the development of new formulations and to build process understanding focused on:

• Green formulations - via use of non-petrochemical or recycled materials as feedstocks
• Development of new and optimised processes - that combine decarbonised energy sources
• Transferring low-carbon solutions down the supply chain - creating formulations with smaller volumes which are easier to transport to reduce logistics emissions as well as formulations that reduce consumers’ environmental footprint

Our Centre is supported by the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Formulation Engineering: Formulation for Net Zero which facilitates the above research through two key themes:

• Digital Manufacture - digital and data enable enhanced understanding, monitoring, optimisation and flexibility which can support wider efforts to reach net zero
• Manufacturing Net Zero - successful decarbonisation will require new understanding of how new net-zero-by-design formulations can be scaled-up ensuring stability and predictability of processes

Our Centre was pioneered within Chemical Engineering at the University of Birmingham (UoB), in 2001 and celebrates its Silver Jubilee this year. Over the past twenty-five years, we have delivered a pipeline of innovation, impact and people to the formulated products sector, which is central to UK prosperity and larger than aerospace and automotive sectors combined (sector size > £180bn, KTN report 2018).

Successive Centres for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Formulation Engineering have been critical to this pipeline, supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) since the scheme’s inception in 2001.

The CDT places a minimum of ten students per year with our partners, leveraging over £50M in EPSRC and industry funding since its inception with the majority of students carrying out research in industry R&D facilities. This enables co-generation of research ideas between academics and industrialists and shared data at point of generation and impact.

Our industry collaborators are global and multi-sector, as evidenced in the below table

The Centre hosts academics in the School of Chemical Engineering who conduct research under the theme of Formulation Engineering.

• Professor Mark Simmons

   

  Centre Director