Engineering excellence award for university spin-out

 

One of the first successful spin-out company of Imperial College London has won the Royal Academy of Engineering’s (RAEng) MacRobert Award of £50,000.

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The company provides the chemical process industry with mathematical modelling software.

HRH Prince Philip Duke of Edinburgh presented the prize at the 2007 RAEng Awards last night.

The MacRobert Award is the UK's most prestigious prize for innovation in engineering, and is awarded annually for the demonstration of engineering excellence and innovation with proven commercial outcomes and benefits to the community.

Spun out of Imperial College in 1997 and now part of the portfolio of Imperial Innovations, the technology commercialisation and investment company, Process Systems Enterprise (PSE) is a global operation with 75 per cent of the company’s revenues coming from exports.

Its innovative software, gPROMS, helps process industry companies to maximise product quality, minimise production costs and control environmental impact through the use of high-accuracy predictive mathematical models of their processes.

For example, the software can accurately predict temperatures and product compositions inside a complex chemical reactor, helping to improve production and product quality and providing advance warning of dangerous 'hot spots'.

Making rapid decisions crucial for the industry

The technology is based on the research of Professor Costas Pantelides and colleagues in the Centre for Process Systems Engineering at Imperial.

Professor Pantelides, who is also Managing Director of PSE, said: "We are delighted and honoured to have won the MacRobert Award. As a company that not only innovates but also helps others to innovate, we value this recognition highly.

"The process industry is going through a period of significant opportunities and challenges: unprecedented demand for products, increasing customer expectations of product performance, decreasing availability of primary raw materials, and global concerns relating to energy consumption, safety and environmental impact. We bring the means to make decisions rapidly, based on accurate numbers."

Susan Searle, CEO of Imperial Innovations, said: "Imperial Innovations is delighted that PSE has won the MacRobert Award. We recognise the tremendous progress and future potential of PSE, and are working with the company closely to develop new geographical markets and sectors for its growth.

"In particular, we see that PSE has major potential in the environment sector where companies are designing new product manufacturing methods with lower carbon footprints and large metropolitan areas are developing more environmentally sustainable urban systems."

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