Sustainable Chemicals and Materials Manufacturing Hub
About us
The SCHEMA Hub is one of the UKRI Manufacturing Hubs for a Sustainable Future, funded by the EPSRC, aimed at developing the new science and engineering to facilitate the transformation to a future sustainable chemicals industry. SCHEMA is a collaboration between world-leading researchers across six UK universities, with the support from a consortium of national and international strategic partners spanning sectors and supply chains.
Our interconnected work packages address the full life-cycle from renewable feedstocks to chemicals to products, embedding principles of circularity, sustainability, and digitalisation to facilitate agility and resilience.
We engage with partners in the public, private, and third sectors to ensure research is translatable and industrially relevant – addressing key challenges in the manufacturing of sustainable chemicals and polymers.
Products & services
Academic-Industrial Collaboration
We engage with partners in the public, private, and third sectors to ensure research is translatable and industrially relevant – addressing key challenges in the manufacturing of sustainable chemicals and polymers. Potential collaborative projects range from discovery to translation research. Contact us to learn more about opportunities for co-created research and development.
Work Package 1: Renewable Chemicals and Power
Developing selective, scalable, and efficient methods to transform small molecules (CO2, water, O2) and wastes (biomass and plastics) into chemicals and intermediates.
Work Package 2: Digitalisation
Delivering efficient manufacturing through an open-access digital production and product property data platforms, integrating sustainability life-cycle data with structure-property insight to underpin theoretical and predicative models.
Work Package 3: Polymers, Materials, and Application Development
Transforming 'green' chemicals into sustainable polymers, resins, elastomers, and adhesives by exploring a range of polymerizations, including scalable condensation/addition reactions and heterocycle/CO2 ring-opening (co)polymerizations, and integrating them with renewable power. The overall polymer design will encompass explicit consideration of product re-use, re-manufacturing, recycling, and, where relevant, biodegradation.
Work Package 4: Process Chemistry and Engineering
Developing multi-phase manufacturing process chemistry and engineering, integrated with renewable power to design for grid intermittency, better process heat management, and fuel cells for chemical plants. Establishing robust, scalable and re-configurable future manufacturing systems for both batch and flow operations.
Work Package 5: Sustainability Assessments
Assessments integrated with technical and theoretical results from research across work packages.