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Formeric accelerates the development of formulated chemical products using HPC & computer aided formulation.
About
Formeric, a pre-formation venture from STFC, has developed software and modeling tools deployed through light-weight platforms for formulated product development. These tools augment the process of chemical experimentation, delivering increases in the speed of product development by increasing the scale of experimentation and reducing the cost of lab based experimentation. The service will integrate into existing product development processes for formulated products, allowing users to predict outcomes in silico. This is both quicker and cheaper and comes with added insight compared to standard laboratory experiments. The development of new formulated products (e.g., shampoo, oils, paints) is currently highly dependent on an exhaustive experimental process with typical product development timelines of >12-18 months. The service offered by Formeric is designed to accelerate the R&D and manufacturing sections of the product development process complementing experimental data with a virtual formulation model. This will significantly reduce a product’s time-to-market and improve sustainability of the whole product development process. In civil and mechanical engineering, the design process is completed almost entirely by computer. A long-held goal in radical formulated product design is to shift from an ad hoc labour-intensive process towards a more robust and adaptive CAF paradigm. Computer Aided Formulation (CAF) is a circle of “closed-loop design” wherein computer algorithms will direct the next sequence of targeted experiments and accelerate robustly formulated product development. Formulated products include shampoos, cosmetic creams and gels, detergent powders, paints, adhesives, lubricants and pesticides, which are ubiquitous in everyday life. In 2014, building on positive previous work with industry, STFC secured an Innovate UK grant to explore the potential of CAF to accelerate the design and optimisation of new liquid formulations. Results from this research across an extended formulation space were encouraging, to the point where the solution behaviour, formulation stability and surface interaction properties are accurately predicted, providing new process modelling toolsets that potentially revolutionise formulated product development. STFC are aiming to accelerate further the application and adoption of the CAF technologies. This work is currently underway in the Hartree Centre, integrating the software into a deployable MVP service for transfer to the spin‑out company Formeric.
Key Benefits
The service offered by Formeric is designed to complement the existing laboratory-based product development process and will: • Offer increased throughput of experiments by leveraging scalable HPC cloud solutions; • Provide an easy-to-access HPC service; • Offer access and provide recommendations to a database of supplier compounds; • Provide insights by visualising compound interactions during the in-silico experiment, aiding IP development; • Reduce waste generation during manufacturing by adjusting formulation composition to account for supply variations.
Applications
The target market is the chemical formulation industry, with personal care, household chemicals, agrochemicals, lubricants, fuel additives, pharmaceuticals and process chemicals identified as key market sectors that will generate significant demand for this software. Extensive market analysis indicates that the formulation industry is transiting towards digital manufacturing systems but it is yet to adopt any tools to automate product research & development. The initial target customer is formulation chemists within the Personal & Health Care market and their supplier base. Other formulation industries will be targeted in turn as the development of the software and production of datasets progresses.