STFC Hartree — HPC speeding products to market — A week’s work in just 40 minutes…

Challenge:

Against a highly competitive market environment, speed-to-market is critical, espe­cially for UK companies creating new products every year.

To accelerate and support devel­opment of new ways of designing, improving and manufacturing complex, high-value formulat­ed products, high performance computing (HPC) can now shave months or even years off product development and therefore cost.

Solution:

Unilever, Syngenta and Infineum selected the exper­tise and facilities at STFC’s Hartree Centre within a joint initiative to develop a range of new soft­ware tools, being funded as part of a £1m grant from Innovate UK.

A week’s experimentation on a new product formulation can now be done in just 40 minutes through advanced computer modelling, simulation and 3D visualization

An ​‘app’ — developed by Hartree in association with IBM — is con­nected to the Centre’s Blue Joule supercomputer, capable of more than 15 trillion calculations per second. It can accurately predict the behaviour and structure of different concentrations of liquid compounds and how they will interact, both in the packaging, throughout shelf-life and in use, helping researchers plan fewer, more focused.

Benefits:

Manufacturers – rather than computational scien­tists – are enabled to routinely run predictive simulation tests through the ​‘app’, with speed-to-market for new product designs potentially being reduced by up to 80%. Environmentally friendly cleaning products; cleaner, more efficient lubricating oils and fuels; more sustainable crop protection prod­ucts and breakthrough personal care products are just some of the consumer and industrial products that will benefit from the three-year initiative.

Timeline: 2013