The global trend towards more sustainable development has encouraged the use of biomass as a renewable feedstock. Biomass is now used to produce biofuels for energy, proteins and nucleic acids as therapeutics, enzymes for biocatalysis, and these are on top of its applications in food and food ingredient manufacturing. While biomass is more sustainable than fossil fuel, biomass supply is limited. Recognizing this, the government is planning to publish its Biomass Strategy in 2022 to review the amount of sustainable biomass available to the UK. Prior to this, the UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) published the Biomass Policy Statement in Nov 2021 to set out the government's key principles for a biomass priority use framework. This prioritization clearly signals limited biomass supply and its logistics as key challenges for manufacturing. We have seen how over-reliance on a single resource (e.g., fossil fuel) can lead to depletion and how geopolitical factors can influence resource accessibility (e.g., COVID vaccines and Ukraine war on gas), both of which push prices up for essential needs. It is thus critical that we broaden our feedstock options by (1) moving away from virgin biomass to explore waste biomass and (2) identifying alternative sustainable feedstock that can be used for biomanufacturing. This project focuses on the use of carbon dioxide in air as an alternative sustainable feedstock in biomanufacturing. We will engineer and optimize a carbon dioxide utilizing microorganism that converts carbon dioxide in air into polyhydroxyalkanoate, a biobased and biodegradable plastic. Development of this technology will benefit the sustainable growth of the UK bioeconomy, a sector worth £220bn in 2014 and expected to reach £440bn in 2030 according to the UK Bioeconomy Strategy. It will also allow us to tap into the value of carbon dioxide, a highly accessible but insufficiently explored resource.

The manufacture of chemicals makes a major contribution to the UK's economy; £10 bn p.a. in the chemicals and £9bn in the pharmaceuticals sectors alone. The recent report of the Chemistry Growth Strategy Group states that 'By 2030, the UK chemical industry will have further reinforced its position as the country's leading manufacturing exporter and enabled the chemistry-using industries to increase their Gross Value Added contribution to the UK economy by 50%' with "smart manufacturing" as one of three priorities in realising their vision. Our proposal aims to contribute to this smart manufacturing by transforming the way in which continuous photochemistry can be applied to commercial chemical manufacture. There is considerable current academic interest in new photochemical reactions for organic synthesis but how they might be used industrially is usually ignored. Nevertheless the potential of photochemistry in manufacturing is widely recognized if only it could be made scalable and efficient. Traditionally the pharmaceutical and fine chemicals industries have used batch reactors for manufacture, which are difficult to adapt effectively for photochemistry. Therefore, this proposal focuses on continuous reactors which not only permit innovation in design to overcome technical limitations of current photoreactors but also provide a direct route to increased throughput via scale up or scale out. We will tackle some of the technical and engineering issues inherent in conventional photoreactors. These engineering problems include getting light efficiently into the reactors, build-up of opaque material on transparent surfaces key safety issues, particularly in reactions involving oxidation, as well as cost issues related to low efficiency of many light sources and difficulties of scale up. Our project proposes to create new engineering approaches to continuous photochemical manufacture of chemicals, which could transform chemical processes and cost. Our proposal addresses key technical/scientific barriers frustrating current commercial use of photochemistry and promises cheaper products in the pharmaceutical, agrochemical and fine chemicals sectors. Our team consists of three investigators with a proven track record of taking chemical processes from laboratory to commercial plant. Between us, we have the expertise needed for success; namely, in photochemistry, continuous organic reactions, manufacturing, mechanical and chemical engineering and process monitoring.

Most chemical products are designed to have an effect, for example nutritional, hygiene, medical, disease and pest control, colouration, flavour, and preservation. Formulations are used to enhance and/or stabilise these desired effects and deliver the benefit at the point of use. The majority of formulated products in the Food, Home & Personal Care, Healthcare, Pharmaceutical, Agrochemicals, Fine Chemical, Catalysts, Coatings and Specialty Chemical sectors are Complex Particulate Products that contain solid or liquid particles (or droplets). Evidence for this is found in the breadth of companies supporting this CDT bid across these key economic sectors. The proposed CDT will train scientists and engineers capable of leading research teams for the development of new complex particulate products and the associated intensified processes (efficient, lean and agile) for their manufacture. The TSB high-value manufacturing strategy highlights the UK's need to apply 'leading-edge technical knowledge' to the 'creation of products' to underpin a technology-led economy where 'innovation in manufacturing' is a central theme. This demands a step-change in the current engineering skill-base, notably through promotion of more effective integration of research between scientists, engineers and product designers. Particle science and engineering underpins a wide-range of manufacturing sectors in the UK and across this space, there is a strong requirement for engineers and physical scientists who can iteratively translate novel materials discoveries through the design and development of scalable manufacturing processes, into innovative high-quality products (following for example a 6-sigma strategy). The shortage of highly trained researchers to support novel and sustainable manufacturing approaches in this area is a current risk for major UK based manufacturing companies as well as SMEs. Current academic training is largely analytical and focuses on materials discovery (new molecules, new materials), or on product formulation issues (physical/chemical stability, product effect), or on manufacturing and processing (scale up, unit operation, design and development of chemical and biochemical processes). There is generally little integration from materials to products with all the various processing stages needed, across the research, development and manufacturing supply chain. The efficient delivery of novel high-quality complex formulated products into the market requires a shared understanding of the challenges and limitations between researchers and practitioners working at all aspects of the product design and manufacture. This CDT will challenge the current culture of more tightly focussed research by providing comprehensive training for all students across the relevant domain space with a stroing focus on teamwork at all stages including during the PhD research phase. For the students the Centre will provide a unique training environment, combining innovative industry relevant training with world-class research supervision in a problem-led educational environment. Ultimately the combination of skills provided by the Centre will contribute strongly to the development of new research leaders in this field for both industry and academia.

Our vision is to use continuous photochemistry and electrochemistry to transform how fine chemicals, agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals are manufactured in the UK. We aim to minimize the amount of chemicals, solvents and processing steps needed to construct complex molecules. We will achieve this by exploiting light and/or electricity to promote more specific chemical transformations and cleaner processes. By linking continuous photochemistry and electro-chemistry with thermal flow chemistry and environmentally acceptable solvents, we will create a toolkit with the power to transform all aspects of chemical synthesis from initial discovery through to chemical manufacturing of high-value molecules. The objective is to increase efficiency in terms of both atoms and energy, resulting in lower cost, low waste, low solvent footprints and shorter manufacturing routes. Historically photo- and electro-chemistry have been under-utilised in academia and industry because they are perceived to be complicated to use, difficult to scale up and engineer into viable processes despite their obvious environmental, energy and cost benefits. We will combine the strategies and the skills needed to overcome these barriers and will open up new areas of science, and deliver a step-change (i) providing routes to novel molecular architectures, hard to reach or even inaccessible by conventional methodologies, (ii) eliminating many toxic reagents by rendering them unnecessary, (iii) minimizing solvent usage, (iv) promoting new methodologies for synthetic route planning. Our proposal is supported by 21 industrial partners covering a broad range of sectors of the chemistry-using industries who are offering £1.23M in-kind support. Therefore, we will study a broad range of reactions to provide a clear understanding of the most effective areas for applying our techniques; we will evaluate strategies for altering the underlying photophysics and kinetics so as to accelerate the efficiency of promising reactions; we will transform our current designs of photochemical and electrochemical reactors, with a combination of engineering, modelling and new fabrication techniques to maximize their efficiency and to provide clear opportunities for scale-up; we will exploit on-line analytics to accelerate the optimisation of continuous photochemical and electrochemical reactions; we will design and build a new generation of reactors for new applications; we will identify the most effective strategies for linking our reactors into integrated multi-step continuous processes with minimized waste; we will demonstrate this integration on at least one synthesis of a representative pharmaceutical target molecule on a larger scale; we will apply a robust series of sustainability metrics to benchmark our approaches against current manufacturing.