The Biorenewables Development Centre: Bridging the gap

Event details

York Society of Engineers Lecture

One of the biggest hurdles a new product or process faces is the first step out of the research lab towards commercialisation. Many innovations fail at this point due to lack of funding or lack of access to facilities that enable the scaleup required to demonstrate that a process can indeed work at scale and is viable as a commercial venture.

The Biorenewables Development Centre (BDC) is a not-for-profit, open access research and development centre founded by the University of York, specifically designed to support technology and innovation through the first challenging steps of scale-up.

The BDC specialises in translation and scale-up of sustainable biobased and chemical processes and products and, since 2012, the BDC has worked with more than 650 customers, ranging from academic groups, micro companies, smallmedium enterprises to global industry leaders, delivering more than 1,700 projects across Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs) 2-9. The BDC works closely with its clients and collaborators to develop complete process options spanning the utilisation of by-products and feedstocks to the purification of final products. The centre provides costeffective access to a full range of pretreatment, bioprocessing, and downstream purification technologies at scales particularly suited to address TRL 3-6, with core facilities at the 1-100 kg/1-100 L range. Alongside this, the centre has extensive experience of hosting and developing operational excellence for novel bio-based process equipment and technologies up to 40,000 L and tonne scales. The BDC also provides a broad range of wrap-around enterprise and commercialisation support, including market/product evaluation, stakeholder engagement and customer feedback, as well as supply chain development with unique expertise in bio-based feedstock sourcing and utilisation.

This presentation will include examples of projects tackling real world problems where the BDC has developed and demonstrated scale-up processes involving novel components and systems, and will highlight the challenges and successes the BDC has encountered along the way. Examples of projects will be presented where the BDC has used its specialist expertise in emerging and high potential technology areas, including fermentation science, anaerobic digestion and dark fermentation for biomethane and biohydrogen production, plant biomass valorisation, high value chemical separation, advanced pyrolysis and biochar production.

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