ARCCA facilities supporting work to improve the circularity of the UK chemical industry

A research team led by Dr Alberto Roldan Martinez from the School of Chemistry has been awarded funding as part of a National Interdisciplinary Centre for Circular Chemical Economy (NIC3E). Alberto’s team will require the use of ARCCA’s supercomputing services to accelerate the design of durable and efficient catalysts.

As part of NIC3E, the Cardiff team will design catalysts to transform discarded compounds to useful chemicals, such as lubricants and fuels. Catalysis is the process of using specific materials to speed up chemical reactions making products cheaper, cleaner, safer and more sustainable. With an estimated 90% of all chemical reactions being catalysed in current industrial process, catalysis lies at the heart of NIC3E.

Taking advantage of Hawk’s recently expanded networking fabric from Mellanox (200 Gb/s), dedicated computational resources will be added to Hawk through the pluggable infrastructure approach to enable a new dedicated researcher compute partition. The use of this partition will enable Alberto’s team to carry out computer simulations to screen hundreds of materials accelerating the design of durable and efficient catalysts transforming disregarded carbon-based compounds, including CO₂, into bulk chemicals such as olefines.

Read the recently published University news item about the NIC3E award which will bring together universities, industrial and international partners to devise ways of reducing our reliance on the import of raw materials for our industries.