Sustainable Separation Membranes for Green Pharmaceutical Manufacturing

Started

Not Energy Related
Energy Efficiency(Industry)
Other Cross-Cutting Technologies or Research(Environmental, social and economic impacts)

Basic and strategic applied research

BIOLOGICAL AND AGRICULTURAL SCIENCES (Biological Sciences)
PHYSICAL SCIENCES AND MATHEMATICS (Chemistry)

Systems Analysis related to energy R&D
Sociological economical and environmental impact of energy (Environmental dimensions)

Andrew Livingston
Queen Mary University of London

Standard

EPSRC

01 June 2025

01 June 2028

36 months

£1,417,965

Unknown

London

Manufacturing and the Circular Economy

Andrew Livingston, Queen Mary University of London

Benoit Chachuat, Imperial College London
Nilay Shah, Imperial College London

A major contributor to anthropogenic carbon emissions are separation processes in industry, which account for 10–15% of global energy consumption. This is mainly attributable to the tremendous amount of heat needed for the liquid-to-gas phase changes required during classical industrial operations used in the chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturing industries, such as evaporation and distillation. These are used to recover and purify the organic solvents in which many chemical reactions are carried out. As the pharmaceutical industry makes the transition to net zero, there is a need for alternatives to evaporation and distillation to recycle solvents. Membranes are physical barriers that can be used to selectively permeate some molecules in a liquid, while retaining others. The great advantage of membrane separation is that there is no need to boil the liquid to separate its components – everything can be done in the liquid phase. This is why membrane reverse osmosis has become the predominant technique for seawater recovery by desalination – it uses a great deal less energy than evaporation. We have recently developed at a small-scale, a whole new range of polymer membranes with excellent selectivity between solutes present in organic solvents. These membranes are fabricated by dissolving a polymer in an (often toxic) organic solvent, and then we make them chemically stable by crosslinking them by through immersion in another (this time hot) organic solvent with a crosslinker, which joins the polymer chains and stops them degrading. Using this approach, we can make membranes that filter out solutes bigger than about 250 daltons. This is suitable for separating big and small solutes in solution but is not sufficient to filter all solutes from a solvent and enable it to be recycled. The production of membranes also creates environmental burdens, and so it is important that we make sure that any waste created in making membranes, and in end-of-life disposal, is a lot less than the waste avoided by using the membranes. The objectives of this research programme are: (i) to develop a simulation and modelling framework that enables us to evaluate the overall environmental burdens involved in making, using and disposing of a membrane to establish where the main burdens are, so we can reduce/eliminate them; (ii) we will seek to develop new, sustainable processes for membrane manufacture, completely eliminating the use of organic solvents in membrane crosslinking and replacing toxic solvents used in membrane fabrication by green, biobased alternatives; (iii) to discover membrane surface treatments that can prolong membrane lifetime and so improve overall environmental performance; (iv) we will develop ways of employing these membranes for complex molecular separations in pharmaceutical manufacturing, if necessary, using multiple membrane steps to achieve challenging goals with minimal energy inputs; (v) we will further study how these new approaches based on membranes can usher in the use of green solvents for the pharmaceutical processes. If we achieve (i)-(v), we will then turn attention to a stretch objective,  new membranes based on bio-derived or recycled polymers. Our  research will be guided and shaped by collaboration with our industrial partners Merck, Exactmer, and AstraZeneca who bring expertise and challenges from membrane manufacturing, green solvent utilisation, and pharmaceutical manufacturing. Ultimately our goal is to enable manufacturing of medicines with a significantly reduced environmental burden, contributing towards sustainable growth in the UK

22/10/25