Boosting R&D Innovation In European Chemical & Petrochemical Industries

Symyx Technologies, Inc has reported an enthusiastic response from European chemical and petrochemical companies to their growing suite of modular and integrated workflow tools for accelerating R&D innovation. Faced with an ever-increasing need to minimise the time to bring new ideas to market, chemical and petrochemical companies in Europe are looking to new generation R&D tools to enable experimentation to run significantly faster - and at less cost - so that projects can achieve a higher probability of success. Symyx Tools are designed to accelerate R&D while reducing costs. Innovative softwaredriven instruments integrate and automate laboratory experimentation, increasing testing capacity by 10-100 times while eliminating costly, labour-intensive routine work. Symyx Tools for chemical and petrochemical applications are completely modular, so they can be configured into a range of integrated workflows for specific experimental applications. Borealis, a leading provider of innovative, value creating plastics solutions, has implemented a Parallel Pressure Reactor (PPR) research tool supplied by Symyx Technologies as part of a project to drastically reduce the time taken to develop new materials. The first polymerisation trials were successfully completed at Borealis’ Innovation Centre in Porvoo, Finland. The PPR is a fully automated workflow system that comprises 48 mini-reactors, each with a volume of just a few millilitres, which can simultaneously carry out 48  polymerisation experiments in a single day – far faster than current approaches. The system is ideally suited for catalyst and process research. “This new equipment provides a major step forward for our research community and helps us develop innovations much faster and more efficiently”, said Alfred Stern, Borealis Vice President for Innovation and Technology.