NIRI has expanded its chemistry consultancy offering, investing in facilities and equipment - using its chemistry support and materials research capabilities.
Offering expert advice on a range of topics including reformulation, characterisation, supply chain validation, and technology transfer, NIRI is well placed to provide guidance and support to clients looking to improve the quality and performance of their products and decrease the time to market.
With world-class expertise in chemistry and advanced materials consultancy, NIRI has more than 400 years of textile science expertise across the company. The team is led by the company’s co-founder and group technical director Professor Stephen Russell, an internationally renowned expert in nonwovens with more than 250 publications and patents from his 30 years leading in the field of R&D and directing NIRI’s technical projects.
Similarly, as chief innovation officer, Steven Neill has more than 20 years of commercial experience and new product development, and manages NIRI’s innovation process, overseeing the technical delivery of consultancy services.
Under this leadership in chemistry and advanced materials, and under the strategic direction of the Senior Management Team, NIRI is expanding, and the company continues to invest and grow.
New team members include Innovation Scientists, such as Dr. Daniel Tate who leads technology transfer and innovation - particularly in the field of synthetic materials chemistry - and Innovation Engineers including Dr. Harrison Cox, whose PhD in Surface Science focused on the synthesis and development of functional surfaces and thin-film coatings for real-world applications. Here, Daniel offers an overview of some of NIRI’s approaches to advanced materials consultancy, where these are helping NIRI’s client base of over 350 businesses, and how NIRI’s forthcoming expansion into new premises will further enhance their customer offering - helping more businesses develop new products, using NIRI’s R&D expertise and world-class facilities.
Characterisation: NIRI’s capability to understand materials and product performance is in very high demand. Accurate characterisation is crucial in a world ever more focused on sustainability and lifecycle assessment through chemical analysis. This process can take various forms, including failure analysis; tracking degradation pathways and product degradation; examination of impurities; chemical compatibility, and the appropriateness of reengineering or synthesis of additives. These aspects of NIRI’s expertise are utilised by clients across a whole range of sectors - from hygiene, pharmaceutical, cosmetic, and health-related, to the broad scope of filtration technologies and products. Daniel highlights the benefits of growth and investment,
“NIRI have built a reputation on the capability to process and evaluate the feasibility of novel and existing materials, and to characterise and evaluate performance gaps - critical for the translation of R&D into viable commercial products. The expansion of our chemical consultancy, continuing to focus on chemical analysis to understand chemical processes and transformations between constituent components, further enhances this offering. Looking at reformulation, for example, we can evaluate, hypothesise, and make recommendations - adding value for customers through our capacity to offer consultancy, such as quality control or synthesis, based on these findings. For commercialisation of new products, in particular, this can be a game-changer, harnessing characterisation to improve uniformity. In addition to the expanding team of chemistry consultants employed at NIRI, the forthcoming move to the new premises and ongoing investment in technology and equipment will further expand our in-house testing techniques in addition to boosting our ammonia and butane cabin air filter testing capacities. NIRI’s scientists have an enviable reputation in characterising and understanding the limitations of processing PHAs and PLAs, including the design and synthesis of new monomers and polymers and our growing team of chemists means that we can concentrate expertise in this burgeoning field, with new pathway studies looking specifically at aspects such as decomposition - again, crucial to commercialising R&D.”
Technology Transfer: From its origins, in 2005, NIRI has grown to become a consultancy business focusing on nonwoven products and processes, with a significant emphasis on technology transfer. Pilot-scale manufacturing, to support companies’ product development from laboratory scale through to technology and manufacturing demonstration, is a specialism and capability that sees NIRI supporting novel product development across sectors such as PPE and wider medical applications, hygiene, automotive, filtration and defence. This broad range of sector applications is in no small part due to NIRI’s existing capabilities in custom synthesis - up to several kgs - covering additives, dyes, pigments, monomers, and polymers, as well as the capacity for formulation, e.g. dilute binders and additives - from 1litre up to 1,000 litres. Daniel explains the additional opportunities for clients’ development that the growing team of chemists and the new facilities present,
“Working with or on behalf of commercial clients, we are focused on product development, and this extends into new materials and polymers, from the earliest stages of R&D through to commercialisation. We work with organic materials, as well as inorganic materials such as nanoparticles or nanowires, or alloys. The major benefit in our team’s expansion - our additional expertise and capacity - is the opportunity to help customers to take ideas from concept through to commercialisation, as one single partner on their journey. Crucially, from a commercial perspective, we can now look to move further back in Technology Readiness Levels, helping clients to make more rapid and informed decisions around risk management, funding, and general product development.”
Reverse Engineering: Perhaps one of the areas where NIRI’s chemistry expertise is best-utilised is in the area of reverse engineering, and clients across a whole hosts of sectors consult with NIRI regarding the capacity to strip products down to their constituent parts; to characterise and determine the chemical composition of these constituents, and to evaluate, and determine the optimum materials for manufacture. Daniel highlights the benefits of a growing team of chemists and the forthcoming move to larger, new premises with further investment,
“With increased capacity in the team of advanced materials specialists, we are further expanding our capabilities in the full physical and chemical characterisation of constituent components - a really important service to our clients, in that we can suggest and develop alternative materials with matched, or improved, performance. This can be particularly useful where potential issues around IP are flagged. Crucially, in terms of commercialising and taking new products further in development, our facilities - which will be further enhanced in our new premises - enable us to work with clients as their sole partner, using our rapid prototyping and new product development facilities for testing, prototyping, and small-scale production: the cost-effective development of R&D all within commercially viable timescales.”
This is an overview of just a few of the areas where NIRI’s expanding team of chemical engineers and innovation scientists are helping clients to solve real-world development problems, and to take R&D and convert it into novel products with quicker routes to market. Continued recruitment, investing in a growing expert team, together with the catalyst of major investment in new premises in the New Year, are keeping NIRI at the forefront of commercial consultancy in nonwoven and fibrous products and processes.