MBL participates in grant-aided/sponsored projects with many partners including universities, industrial companies and end users.
This joint project with the University of Glasgow aims to revolutionise energy storage technology by exploiting sustainable, naturally-derived seaweed polymers and cutting-edge nanomaterials to develop new, sustainable silicon anode technology for LIBs. Achieving this will deliver transformative advances in charging capacity, recharge times and longevity of batteries without compromising on their safety. Adoption of Silicon based batteries has the potential to transform the future development of electric vehicles (EVs), increasing driving range, slashing charging times and downsizing vehicle drivetrains (dimensions/weight) compared to state-of-the-art graphite anode based systems. The disruptive step of replacing well-established graphite anodes in LIBs with silicon will bring a step-change in charge capacity and increase charged battery life by up to an order of magnitude.
MBL has a long-standing partnership with one of the world's leading medicinal development companies in the field of gastroesophageal reflux diseases (GERD). It has demonstrated that MBL's tailored alginate product, its ultra-low viscosity high-G alginate, is superior to the current industry standard. This project is also developing MBL's unique seaweed nanocellulose for use in this application both on its own, as a synthetic polymer replacement, and in conjunction with alginate.
This MBL-led project centres on the transformation of alginic acid (from MBL’s seaweed biorefinery process) into a novel material with superior performance for toxic gas filtration. MBL's key partner holds patents for the manufacture of cutting-edge adsorbents; additional partners are the University of York (Green Chemistry Centre of Excellence), the Biorenewables Development Centre and ICMEA-UK Ltd, an engineering company which specialises in process scale up. The project's aim is to scale-up an already demonstrated process for these adsorbents. Its longer-term aim is to build an integrated full scale plant in Scotland to make use of indigenous seaweed and abundantly available renewable energy.
MBL's partner in this project is an international engineering company that has extensive experience of designing and building seaweed processing and chemical plants around the world. Together with MBL, it developed a fully-detailed plant design for a 40,000 tonnes per annum (seaweed) production plant using MBL's unique process. This design can be built either as a single integrated plant or split into separate HUB and SPOKE sites. Another engineering company specialising in high speed, automated processing of plant materials, also collaborates with MBL to optimise the equipment needed for the mechanical pre-treatment step in MBL's seaweed biorefinery process.
MBL's extensive range of university (and research institute) partners and collaborators includes:
Funding for MBL's projects has come from several commercial* partners and public funding bodies. Grant funding has been obtained from: