Abstract

Bridging Industry and Academia with Enabling Technologies

Claudio Battilocchio , Research Associate, University of Cambridge

Society is demanding that academia addresses increasingly more challenging tasks. This has to be followed by a rapid knowledge transfer from academia to industry, something that is a bottleneck in some research environments. Consequently, all knowledge gained in an academic context must be re-evaluated within industry, to facilitate scale-up of key findings. This bridging step between “the two schools of thought” is seen as a key element that adds significant value to the chemical industry. In this context, enabling technologies are finding increasing interest and use in both the industrial and academic settings, providing a number of advantages and leading to very interesting opportunities.2 Our current research is focused on the integration of existing tools and the creation of new methods to make our chemical processes directly suitable for scale up, with particular interest in improving safety when handling hazardous chemicals, minimising waste production and implementing the efficiency and sustainability of chemical processes. Our recent partnerships with different industrial collaborators have focused on different areas, including heterogeneous catalysis, reactive intermediates, forbidden reactions, automated protocols and telescoping a synthetic sequence of steps into a multistep flowing stream.3-10 , In this talk, we will give specific examples of industrial challenges that were solved using specific enabling solutions.