About Us
Process Intensification was arguably "invented" in the 1970s by Colin Ramshaw, a co-founder of Protensive, working for Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) in the UK. Ramshaw was asked to consider the implications of chemical engineering operations under zero gravity. He recognised that while zero g offered few benefits, the effect of operating under enhanced gravity could have some dramatically positive effects. This led to the development of rotating equipment to provide high-g, particularly in gas liquid processing such as distillation. Under a high-g environment equipment could be made much smaller and the term intensified was used to describe such operations.
Ramshaw continued his work on enhanced gravity processing at Newcastle University with the development of the Spinning Disc Reactor, which is being commercialised by Protensive. The initial driver for Process Intensification was capital cost reduction and although cost savings can be made we now recognise that intensified machines are effectively precision processors that can generate novel products, reduce variable costs, enhance manufacturing capability and even create new ways of running a business. We're moving on, Protensive is adept at providing 'out of the box' engineering solutions to process improvement.