Our Mission
Our Mission
Our Mission
"At Scailup, we transform everyday waste into high-quality feedstock for next-generation energy and fuel production—accelerating the global shift to sustainable industry. Through breakthrough scale-up methods, advanced data capture and intelligent digital twins - we’re reengineering the path from idea to impact—faster, cleaner, and smarter than ever before."
Team
Our Mission
Our Mission
We have an impressive array of talent and experience in our team.
Case Studies
Case Studies
Case Studies
Take a look at some of our current Case Studies and Projects
Contact Us
Case Studies
Case Studies
Have questions or comments? We're always here to help. Contact us today and we'll get back to you as soon as possible. We are available at info@scailup.co.uk
Case Study
Recovering valuable resources from waste printed circuit boards
Waste Printed Circuit Boards have valuable metals that should be recycled but are not currently because of the complexity of extracting them.
The worldwide accumulation of waste electrical and electronic equipment is 20–50 million tonnes per year, with a significant fraction of this being waste printed circuit boards (WPCBs). These comprise at least 30% metals with the remainder being thermoplastics and thermosetting resins etc.
This high metal content can vastly exceed that found in mineral resources. The concentration of gold in WPCBs can be 25 times higher than in gold ores while, for copper, this concentration enrichment can be over a thousand-fold. Precious metals are the main targets in the recycling of WPCBs followed by copper, nickel and other base metals.
Although driven by economics, any recycling process needs to deal properly with all metals present in the WPCBs, especially lead which cannot be allowed into the natural environment. In addition, the nature of electrical waste is changing. In 2006, the European Union enforced the policy restricting the use of toxic substances such as lead and cadmium in electronic products.
The new lead-free alloy solders still contain a large proportion of tin which is economically attractive owing to its value as a relatively scarce metal. Tin has a low content in the Earth’s crust and its exploitation from mineral resources is difficult.
At SCAILUP we deploy a hierarchy of separation techniques to deliver the best resource recovery for the least financial cost. We have created a physical separation line which can be used to sort the larger components of electrical waste items. The next stage, for soldered circuit boards, involves a chemical processing step in which high strength nitric acid is used to dissolve the solder that fixes smaller components to the board. This step can also be promoted by use of ultrasound and gives a finer granularity of separation. In addition, the dissolved metals from the solder can be recovered by further processing and the nitric acid can be recycled back into the process.
We are working with partners Quinnovations and Blue Planet Technologies to refine our sorting accuracy and find alternative reagents that are more friendly to the environment.
Methods to recycle complex or hard to recycle materials for example: waste electrical and electronic equipment, contaminated waste (for example personal hygiene, care products, and medical waste), multilayer materials, composite materials advancements in separation and sorting of mixed waste streams for example: mixed textile waste and residual waste the recycling of high value materials, such as rare earth elements where present in products in insufficient volume to make recovery economically viable currently
Projects should:
- be adventurous and ambitious with the potential for high impact
- address real-world challenges
- prioritise environmental sustainability throughout the programme and across the life cycle of the recycling process, to support a more sustainable recycling sector and a greener UK economy
- consider the whole system (technological, economic, social, cultural, and environmental) within which the proposed research outputs would sit.
Rapid process Scale-Up
Scaling up chemical reactions and reactors from gram-scale to industrial production scale is a complex engineering process that hasn’t changed for over 100 years. The major challenges of scale-up are:
· Decreased surface area to volume ratio which effects heat and mass transfer
· Massively increased power requirements and longer times required for mixing
· Moving from batch chemistry (i.e. combining reactants all at once) to continuous flow chemistry (i.e. reacting materials in a continuous flowing stream)
There are many historic case studies in which a failure to account for these challenges have resulted in unsafe or inefficient process designs which are inoperable. The traditional answer, therefore, has been to follow a careful series of steps to scale up equipment (or amount of material for reaction) by 1 or 2 orders of magnitude at a time to gain a better understanding of the reaction chemistry at increasing scales.
The problem with this approach, however, is that it is time consuming and costly, typically taking many years and many millions of pounds spent before the production scale system is even designed, let alone built. The long payback times make it very difficult to secure investment from the private sector, which leaves chemical process development in the hands of big corporations with deep pockets. This massively stifles competition and much-needed innovation in a sector that must rapidly re-invent its processes to decarbonise by 2050.
We have a new approach which we call PAIME (‘Perturb All Inputs & Measure Everything’) to rapidly scale up from a test system to a full-scale production plant.
The central idea of our method is to make far more measurements at the smallest scale (the Bench Scale) than in the traditional process development method. These measurements are achieved by multiple sensors for temperature, pressure etc. combined with online analysis methods such as gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) to measure reactor conversion.
We have a new approach which we call PAIME (‘Perturb All Inputs & Measure Everything’) to rapidly scale up from a test system to a full-scale production plant.
The central idea of our method is to make far more measurements at the smallest scale (the Bench Scale) than in the traditional process development method. These measurements are achieved by multiple sensors for temperature, pressure etc. combined with online analysis methods such as gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) to measure reactor conversion.
The PAIME approach can be considered to adopt a signal processing philosophy in which time varying inputs in feed composition and throughput (composition and quantity of materials undergoing reaction, respectively) are applied and the outputs recorded. These data are fed into a dynamic model (digital twin) which has a detailed representation of the chemistry and hydrodynamics of the reactor. In particular, both spatial and temporal variations in the reactor are modelled using partial differential equations and/or multi-physics approaches.
By-passing the traditional process scale-up paradigm using a PAIME informed Digital Twin Reactor with Machine Learning
By thoroughly collecting large sets of data that represent all aspects of the target reaction chemistry, we then use complementary ‘Black Box’ statistical data analysis and machine learning methods to optimise designs for large-scale plants from bench scale systems.
To learn more about the SCAILUP approach and our areas of research and development, please get in touch at info@scailup.co.uk
Municipal Waste Processing for Gasification
Gasification is an established technology for clean energy, hydrogen and fuels production. The fate of most household ‘black bin bag’ waste in the UK is pre-processing (sorting, drying and shredding) to produce Refuse Derived Fuel (RDF) which is then burnt in Energy-from-Waste (EfW) plants to make power. Gasification, as opposed to combustion, is a more efficient and potentially much cleaner way to convert waste into energy. The ‘syngas’ produced by gasification contains high energy carbon monoxide and hydrogen which can be combusted in gas turbines which gives better energy efficiency than steam boilers. In addition, it is easier to capture the carbon dioxide produced in gas turbine power plants than in standard steam raising power plants, although this is still not widely practiced.
The reason that very few gasification EfW plants have been commissioned in the UK is that direct RDF gasification has been shown to be very troublesome. This is due to the highly non-uniform composition of RDF and the variability in the size and weight of the individual RDF fragments. Fluidised bed gasifiers have been proven to be the best technology for large-scale applications such as EfW plants. These are large columns in which the fuel particles are suspended by the gasifying agent (usually air) being blown in from the bottom of the column. This enhances mixing and heat transfer which is important for reliable operation in a large-scale continuous process. The problem with raw RDF is that some fragments are small and light and so will be blown out of the column almost immediately, whereas larger, heavier RDF fragments will tend to settle at the bottom of the column and take much longer to react.
Wood pellets (on the other hand) are an excellent feedstock for gasifiers, enabling them to operate continuously and reliably for long periods of time. The reason for this is that they are sufficiently uniform in size and density that each pellet has a similar behaviour once inside the fluidised bed gasifier which leads to more predictable and reliable operation. Pellets are also easier to store, convey and discharge from hoppers which greatly simplifies the handling of the fuel feedstock.
SCAILUP have developed a process to convert municipal waste into pellets which is still under development. Waste is a much more economically attractive feedstock than wood pellets because it has zero or negative cost. The conversion of waste into pellets with properties that are as uniform as wood pellets will be a transformative technology. Our process involves a series of sorting steps in which the key constituents of the waste are separated and stored. Then there is a blending operation in which those stored constituents are blended back together in the pelletiser in the right proportions to give good quality waste pellets for gasification. We can deal with most different types of waste stream including ‘difficult-to-handle’ or hazardous waste stream such as those from public litter bins or clinical waste.
Our Team
Engineering
Engineering
Engineering
Steve Wilkinson: Chartered Chemical Engineer, with a career spanning industry and academia in the UK and USA. He has deep interest in applying automation, AI and sensor technology to radically accelerate the time to commercialisation of new processes and address the climate emergency.
Feedstock
Engineering
Engineering
Aidan Brooker: has over two decades of experience in total waste management solutions specialising in maximisation of material recovery and driving efficiency in recycling operations. Passionate about sustainability, he is committed to helping industries achieve the circular economy.
Finance
Engineering
Technology
Richard Wilkinson: a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants with more than 30 years of experience in financial accounting and consultancy. During this time, he has co-founded several companies which he has financed and built up into highly profitable concerns.
Technology
Engineering
Technology
Ian Forde-Smith: over 30 years of experience across industries including Power, Aviation, Agriculture and Defence. He is a hands-on technologist known for delivering transformative solutions. A passionate practitioner of AI and Machine Learning, he leverages cutting-edge technologies to drive innovation and business growth.