Ahead of a move to new premises in the New Year, NIRI have expanded its chemistry consultancy offering, investing in state-of-the-art facilities and equipment – bolstering its specialist chemistry support and advanced materials research capabilities. Offering expert advice on a range of topics including reformulation, characterisation, supply chain validation, and technology transfer, NIRI is well placed to provide expert guidance and support to clients looking improve the quality and performance of their products and decrease the time to market.
 
With world-class expertise in chemistry and advanced materials consultancy, NIRI has more than 400 years of textile science expertise across the company. The team is led by the company’s co-founder and group technical director professor Stephen Russell, an internationally renowned expert in nonwovens with more than 250 publications and patents from his 30 years leading in the field of R&D and directing NIRI’s technical projects.  Similarly, as chief innovation officer, Steven Neill has more than 20 years of commercial experience and new product development, and manages NIRI’s innovation process, overseeing the technical delivery of consultancy services. 
 
Under this leadership in chemistry and advanced materials, and under the strategic direction of the Senior Management Team, NIRI is expanding, and the company continues to invest and grow.  New team members include Innovation Scientists, such as Daniel Tate who leads technology transfer and innovation – particularly in the field of synthetic materials chemistry – and Innovation Engineers including Harrison Cox, whose PhD in Surface Science focused on the synthesis and development of functional surfaces and thin-film coatings for real-world applications.  Here, Tate offers an overview of some of NIRI’s approaches to advanced materials consultancy, where these are helping NIRI’s client base of over 350 businesses, and how NIRI’s forthcoming expansion into new premises will further enhance their customer offering – helping more businesses develop new products, using NIRI’s R&D expertise and world-class facilities.
 
“NIRI has built a reputation on the capability to process and evaluate the feasibility of novel and existing materials, and to characterise and evaluate performance gaps – critical for the translation of R&D into viable commercial products,” Tate says. “ The expansion of our chemical consultancy, continuing to focus on chemical analysis to understand chemical processes and transformations between constituent components, further enhances this offering. Looking at reformulation, for example, we can evaluate, hypothesise, and make recommendations – adding value for customers through our capacity to offer consultancy, such as quality control or synthesis, based on these findings. For commercialisation of new products, in particular, this can be a game-changer, harnessing characterisation to improve uniformity. In addition to the expanding team of chemistry consultants employed at NIRI, the forthcoming move to the new premises and ongoing investment in technology and equipment will further expand our in-house testing techniques in addition to boosting our ammonia and butane cabin air filter testing capacities. NIRI’s scientists have an enviable reputation in characterising and understanding the limitations of processing PHAs and PLAs, including the design and synthesis of new monomers and polymers and our growing team of chemists means that we can concentrate expertise in this burgeoning field, with new pathway studies looking specifically at aspects such as decomposition – again, crucial to commercialising R&D.”