Programmes

BASF and Imperial are collaborating through several programmes:

• Innovative Continuous Manufacturing for Industrial Chemicals (IConIC): A £17.8 million research programme in continuous chemical production under the EPSRC Prosperity Partnership scheme. With consortium partners Almac, AM Technology, CPI, METTLER TOLEDO, Autochem, Siemens, SOLVE Chemistry and Sterling Pharma Solutions.
• Flue2Chem: Supporting the work of a consortium, Flue2Chem,
  to design and validate a UK value chain to convert valuable industrial carbon emissions (both fossil and non-fossil) into sustainable materials for consumer products.
• PhD studentships at Imperial-based EPSRC Centres for Doctoral Training: Next Generation Synthesis & Reaction Technology (rEaCt); Statistics and Machine Learning (StatML); Institute of Chemical Biology (ICB)
• Two Royal Academy of Engineering posts: A BASF/RAEng Research Chair held by Professor Ruth Misener (Computing) in Data-Driven Optimisation (2022–2027); a BASF/RAEng Research Fellowship held by Dr Calvin Tsay in Scale-Bridging Modelling and Optimisation (2024–2029)
• Industrial CASE and Industrial Doctoral Landscape EPSRC studentships: Doctoral research under EPSRC studentships aimed at industrial innovation.
• AI for Chemistry Hub, AIChemy: Research with an EPSRC-funded hub for applying AI to chemistry.

About the partnership

Imperial College London, which is ranked as a world top-ten university by QS and Times Higher Education, and BASF, one of the world’s largest chemical companies, are strategic partners in a long-term programme of impact-driven research, education, and translation.

The partnership draws on BASF’s strategic commitment to innovation and the sustainable transformation in industrial chemistry, and Imperial’s model of deep interdisciplinarity and impact-driven problem-solving with external partners. Together, the partners are creating advanced technology and know-how to support the green transformation of the chemical industry (see more on BASF's strategy), and nurturing a new generation of industrial chemists equipped to boost the industry’s economic success, resilience and sustainability.

A community of 18 academics from Imperial, 40 research scientists from BASF, 29 current PhD students and postdoctoral researchers is working with support from EPSRC and other organisations to co-create and roll-out advances in industrial chemistry.

This report provides the academic and industrial chemistry community, and decision-makers at Imperial, BASF, government, and public funding bodies, with an overview of the partnership and the opportunities it is creating.

Research themes

Flow chemistry

Since 2019, BASF and Imperial have been developing technologies and integrated know-how drawing on chemistry, chemical engineering and computing, to introduce flow chemistry, an efficient form of continuous chemical production, at small scales.

Flow chemistry is a form of chemical production in which reactions take place in networks of pipes and reactors that allow fine control of parameters such as temperature and flow rate, and real-time monitoring via sensors. The approach brings improvements in consistency, efficiency and sustainability, and can be integrated with digital technologies such as computational modelling and artificial intelligence.

The partners are working to bring continuous processing to the scales needed for R&D as well as the production of high-value chemicals such as speciality chemicals including crop protection actives and pharmaceuticals. In the future, this might also enable the production of commodities in smaller, regionalscale production sites.

Crystallisation

Crystallisation, controlling the shape and size of crystals, is essential to ensuring, for instance, the purity and stability of active ingredients and formulations used in crop protection, the reliability of batteries, and the performance of catalysts used in chemical production. However, scaling up production of crystalline chemicals often requires a lot of costly and time-consuming experimental work.

Imperial and BASF are combining novel computational approaches with experimental data to improve crystalline products and make their production processes scalable. Better understanding of crystal processes could also improve efficiency, reduce demand for raw materials, solvents and energy, and decrease the environmental impact of manufacturing.

Value and supply chains

Modernising global systems of chemical production requires not only new production technologies but also systems thinking about how best to reconfigure the whole supply chain in light of the associated costs, risks and opportunities. “It’s not just the technology, but where you locate your production sites, the feedstocks and energy sources you use, the CapEx, the OpEx,” explains Dr Olga Walz, data scientist at BASF.

BASF and Imperial are applying techniques such as technoeconomic benchmarking, life cycle assessment and digital twinning of supply chains to drive this decision-making, helping to inform investment decisions and guide R&D efforts to have the greatest economic impact. Importantly, they are also using novel techniques that help manage risk by accounting for the high level of uncertainty inherent in these decisions.

AI and automation

The high levels of monitoring and control enabled by flow chemistry in combination with digital technologies make it possible to build autonomous research machines that improve and accelerate R&D. Moreover, they open up opportunities to augment and automate chemical production, enabling higher performance and lower costs.

“Our research with BASF is helping digitally transform the chemical industry by adapting cutting-edge techniques to sector-specific requirements,” says Professor Ruth Misener, who holds a BASF/RAEng Research Chair in Data-Driven Optimisation at Imperial. Professor Klaus Hellgardt agrees: “We have a very strong strategic partnership around digital tools, modelling, data scientific evaluation – which goes from lab-scale through to process-control, all the way to supply chain optimisation.”

Researchers are using digital technologies to accelerate R&D, for example machine learning models that help industrial chemists more quickly find optimal manufacturing approaches. They are also working toward automating production-scale facilities. “The dream is that you could build a factory in the middle of a desert and leave it to run autonomously,” says Professor Hii.

An innovation community

What started as relationships between individual scientists from Imperial and BASF has grown into a strategic partnership between the two organisations.

“By working with a world-leading university we not only benefit from the insights of the best academic minds and additional resources like match funding. We can also get things done much faster,” says Dr Darren Budd, Managing Director at BASF plc. “This is of great support to BASF’s strategy of working in a streamlined way to accelerate innovation.”

“The pragmatic, impact-driven mindset is what you find at Imperial,” says Dr Christian Holtze, Open Innovation Manager at BASF. “It’s also about the digital mindset: Imperial is very advanced in how they’re deploying digital science into every aspect of research. They are very strong in areas such as scientific modelling and optimisation – and the way the students are educated is always integrating a digital component. This is fairly unique when compared to research and education at other universities.”

The strategic nature of the partnership reflects not only its scale, but also the alignment between priorities of the two organisations, and the partnership is not limited to specific people, departments or topics, but aims at impact and translation. Drawing at present on four Imperial departments and several multidisciplinary centres, a framework agreement signed by BASF’s President of Group Research and Imperial’s Provost in 2022 allows new teams in each organisation to come on board on pre-agreed terms.

Institution-level support

The partnership occurs at all hierarchical levels of the two organisations. Its growth has been spearheaded by senior leaders at both organisations such as Imperial’s Provost and BASF leaders from Germany and the UK such as its President of Group Research and Senior Vice President responsible for open innovation and external collaboration. The organisations have been supported by dedicated partnership specialists on both sides who have devoted the considerable time and energy required to build a partnership on this scale.

“We’ve built up a high degree of mutual trust,” says Professor Richard Craster, Dean of Imperial’s Faculty of Natural Sciences. “With dedicated leads at both ends, we are proactive and energetic, and we’ve created a virtual space where we can work together to solve challenges.”

Industrial innovation

Imperial and BASF’s research is designed to meet academic standards of rigour and novelty and to have practical application to the chemical industry.

Dr Holtze, who is BASF’s lead in the partnership, says that it is not just academic skills but the creative mindset nurtured by the academic environment and the impact-driven, entrepreneurial spirit that makes Imperial an ideal environment for highly ambitious and potentially transformative industrial innovation.

He adds that the community Imperial and BASF are building is of great value to the company. “The partnership offers BASF a flexible resource we can use to carry out ambitious forms of research and development, such as new techniques for producing chiral molecules, that would be more costly and higher risk to carry out in-house, backed by world-leading academic expertise.”

Hands-on involvement by BASF

The active approach by the BASF team includes dayto- day involvement in scoping and co-supervising the PhD and postdoctoral projects carried out at Imperial as members of a lively joint community, with BASF taking up a dedicated office at Imperial’s White City Deep Tech Campus.

“BASF are very hands-on,” says Bhavna Patel, IConIC Centre Manager. “They hold biweekly meetings for students to present their work. Christian, BASF’s lead in the partnership, will always attend along with other BASF researchers and provide feedback. We also hold a residential retreat each year at which the BASF team work with Imperial researchers and students to progress collaborations and plan new projects.”

This deep collaboration leads to research that meets the needs of both academia and industry. “PhD students have opportunities to demonstrate the innovation, excellence and novelty fitting for their academic credentials, while BASF get industrially useful research and access to potential recruits,” says Professor Hii. “It shows you what a successful university-industry collaboration should look like – everyone should get something out of it.”

The triple helix

The partnership is also drawing in other stakeholders from industry and the public sector. “Imperial is an extremely attractive place to meet other businesses outside the usual constraints of B2B meetings and to establish consortia,” says BASF’s Dr Holtze.

Working closely with the two partners are the other companies involved in the IConIC programme. “The consortium is about integrating the whole value chain – instrument suppliers, software suppliers, and people who tie the whole thing together,” says Professor Hii.

The UK government is also a key partner. Dr Holtze says that public funding from EPSRC through the Prosperity Partnership and Centres for Doctoral Training has enabled pioneering and potentially transformative R&D that would otherwise not have been possible.

“Working with a university complements our internal research and development by lending academic understanding to the challenge and bringing in another angle. It focuses on research topics that are highly novel, scientifically exciting, and have potential to radically transform the industry. For such activities public funding is an enabler,” he explains.

Dr Holtze sees initiatives such as SOLVE Chemistry, a UK-based spinout company that Imperial and BASF jointly launched and is now operating independently, as one of the initiatives through which the Germany-headquartered multinational can support the wider industry. “Whilst staying involved with SOLVE through joint research projects, we want to make an impact in the UK to reflect the excellent support and collaboration we’ve received from Imperial and EPSRC.”

“The triple helix is very important to us,” agrees Professor Omar Matar, head of Imperial’s Department of Chemical Engineering. “With academia’s vision, industry’s ability to drive through change, and the right direction and support from government, we can introduce truly transformative, disruptive innovations.”

Future aims

Dr Holtze says: “At BASF we make chemicals on a very large scale. Innovation therefore must aim at reducing the landing costs of our products, keeping capital expenditures low, and making sure we’re flexible in responding to changing conditions such as market or sustainability needs. Moreover, societies in Europe, including the UK, need to make sure their chemical industries are resilient.”

These tasks require answers to challenging research questions that are often best tackled in collaboration by industry and academia, and concerted efforts to bring new technologies to readiness levels at which they are ready for industrial investment. Dr Holtze says: “Together with Imperial, we are co-creating a strategy to remove the hurdles in translating academic innovations in continuous processing into industrial reality.”

Developing new technologies BASF and Imperial leaders say that the next priority of the partnership is to intensify the focus on translation. “Our priority is now to support early-stage technology readiness levels being pushed to later stage and pursue opportunities to create translation successes. This will involve transfer to BASF and other partners, and potentially further spinouts. Our number one aim is help the economy and create impact,” says Professor Craster at Imperial.

“It would be fantastic to be able to move things onto TRLs five, six and seven even,” adds Dr Budd. “That’s when technology innovation becomes commercially viable. Our aim is not only to create new opportunities for BASF but to build an ecosystem that’s capable of transforming the chemical industry – SOLVE is an early example. Eventually we hope to form entirely new value chains in the UK.”

New resources and infrastructure

To boost this ambition, the partners are pursuing innovative solutions to the valleys of death that can stifle the development and adoption of new technologies at both proof-of-concept and later at scale-up stages.

These include public funding and joint ventures to attract external investment, and technical infrastructure to support de-risking Imperial is being supported by BASF and other partners in plans to establish a flow chemistry pilot facility at the Sustainable Futures Lab in South Kensington, with a possible further location in a new West London site that Imperial has acquired as part of the WestTech London innovation ecosystem. Complementing other advanced facilities such as ROAR, this will serve as a translation hub for earlystage innovations coming from the partnership, including flow chemistry.

It will also allow small- to medium-sized businesses and corporations to experiment and demonstrate how they will scale novel lab-scale processes to production scale, which will thereby de-risk investment in new, larger scale, permanent facilities. This will address a valley of death that can block the adoption of new technologies developed in academic labs and help support economic growth and employment.

Looking ahead

Dr Budd at BASF says: “With support from senior stakeholders at BASF and Imperial and the valued support of UK public funding bodies, we are looking forward to creating new opportunities that will help BASF to innovate at higher speed and lower risk than we could on our own, and that also support the UK and society at large. With the right investment, the partnership could even spur whole new value chains in the UK, especially in chemical manufacturing clusters such as North West England and Scotland.”

Reflecting on the partnership and at the challenges ahead, Dr Holtze says: “Our partnership has come a long way since we hired our first PhD students in 2019. We have grown a large community with an effective structure of research clusters. We have achieved very good alignment on the research and translation focus with our collaborating academics. And we have learned how to efficiently use open innovation with academic and industrial partners as well as public funding agencies.”

“But we are at a tipping point: economic challenges in the chemical sector and in the European societies mean we need support to secure the continuity that is required to deploy our transformative innovations and we need to work hard on removing hurdles to technology translation. This will take a concerted effort by the key stakeholders in our partnership – BASF, Imperial, and the public funding institutions.”