BASF
Canvas Category OEM : Chemical
Innovations made BASF the leading chemical company. Today our customers and the whole society are more than ever looking for innovative solutions. We all need answers for problems like climate change, scarcity of resources and marine littering. As the most innovative chemical company we take a special responsibility here, because innovations based on chemistry are key to those answers. With our Carbon Management Program we set a benchmark in achieving the climate protection targets, with our ChemCycling approach we aim towards a circular economy. We also co-founded the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, a global effort to end plastic waste in the environment. This is how we understand our corporate purpose – “We create chemistry for a sustainable future”.
Assembly Line
Imperial and BASF spinout SOLVE to digitally transform chemical manufacturing
Pandemic-beating drugs could enter production more quickly and agrichemicals such as fertilisers could be produced with fewer toxic raw materials thanks to technology from the new company SOLVE. The spinout has been launched by Imperial and global chemical company BASF under an innovative partnership model, with funding from BASF subsidiary Chemovator in a pre-seed round led by venture capital firm Creator Fund.
It is using innovative chemical processing techniques to build up large sets of data on chemical reactions, which it will use to train machine learning models to rapidly predict the optimal ways to manufacture high-value chemicals. The company is building up experimental data sets using novel techniques in flow chemistry, an advanced form of processing in which reactions are carried out in a continuous flow rather than in batch vessels. The technology is designed to enable chemical companies to scale manufacturing of new chemicals more quickly and to optimise manufacturing processes.
Chemovator invests in Detroit-based startup Heartland rethinking plastics using natural fiber reinforcements
Chemovator, the business incubator and early-stage investor of BASF, has successfully finalized an investment in Heartland. The Detroit-based startup is a frontrunner in the production of natural fiber plastic additives, and the latest addition to Chemovator’s external-facing Elevate program.
Supported by a team of scientists, engineers, and technologists, Heartland has developed hemp-based materials that can be used as additives within plastic compounds. This breakthrough advancement in the world of sustainable material innovation improves properties about flammability, bonding, dispersion, and bulk density, which are historically associated with processing natural fibers. As a result, natural fibers are now a viable market opportunity to reduce scope 3 carbon emissions1 in numerous industries.
With this funding, Heartland becomes Chemovator’s first portfolio company in North America and the latest addition to the Chemovator Elevate program. The program aims to support early-stage startups in the chemical industry through monetary investment, access to BASF and its experts, as well as support from a network of experienced entrepreneurs.
Quantistry bags €3M to foster R&D innovation through AI and Quantum
Berlin-based Quantistry, a provider of cloud-native chemical simulation platforms, announced on Tuesday that it has secured €3M in a fresh funding round led by Ananda Impact Ventures. Other investors, including Chemovator, the business incubator of BASF, IBB Ventures, and a Family Office, also participated in the round. The capital injection will boost Quantistry’s efforts to transform chemical and material R&D with Quantum and AI.
Quantistry offers an intuitive cloud-native chemical simulation platform tailored to designing and discovering new sustainable materials. The company does this through its computational platform, which integrates quantum technologies, physics-based simulations, and machine learning. By leveraging quantum-based simulations, multiscale modelling, and AI-driven insights, the company’s tool enhances the optimisation, discovery, and design of innovative materials, offering unprecedented benefits to industries seeking sustainable solutions.
BASF and Inditex make a breakthrough in textile-to-textile recycling with loopamid, the first circular nylon 6 entirely based on textile waste
BASF and Inditex jointly announce a breakthrough in their efforts for boosting recyclability in the textile industry. With the launch of loopamid®, a polyamide 6 (PA6, also known as nylon 6) made from 100 percent textile waste, BASF is providing the first circular solution for nylon apparel made entirely from textile waste. Zara has turned the material into a jacket made from 100 percent loopamid. Following a “design for recycling” approach, all parts, including fabrics, buttons, filling, hook and loop and zipper are made from loopamid.
BASF and Stena Recycling partner in recycling of electric vehicle batteries in Europe
BASF, a global battery materials producer and battery recycler, and Stena Recycling, one of Europe’s leading recycling companies, offering comprehensive solutions in recycling and circular services, have entered into a black mass purchase agreement. This agreement is part of a broader collaboration envisaged by BASF and Stena Recycling with the goal of setting up a battery recycling value chain for the European electric vehicle battery market.
Feel The Hit: Pushing the boundaries of tennis racket manufacturing with 3D printing
Additive Appliances’ tennis racket dampener is additively manufactured using HP’s Multi Jet Fusion technology, with the build volume of the 5200 platform said to be capable of processing thousands of parts at once. The parts, printed in BASF’s Ultrasint TPU material, measure between around 15 to 20 millimetres, and weigh less than 1 gram – up to 70% lighter than the minimal mass requirement of a traditional dampener.
For the design of the components, Additive Appliances has leant on a set of internally developed equations that are transformed into CAD designs through implicit modelling software, such as Altair’s Sulis platform, with the equations being validated using advanced simulation techniques like Optimad Engineering’s proprietary software, before extensive in-house testing is performed with vibrometers and sound spectrum analysers. Post-print, chemical smoothing can help to enhance the aesthetics of the part but has no impact on the mechanical properties and so it can be quicker and cheaper to forego this step.
Tech start-ups race to make EV battery recycling sustainable
A clutch of start-ups, including Hong Kong’s GRST and Oregon-based OnTo Technology, as well as larger companies such as German chemicals giant BASF, are working on a water-based technology seen as a commercially viable and environmentally friendly alternative.
Under the process developed by Hong Kong’s GRST, which is backed by the founder of Taiwanese chipmaker Realtek Semiconductor and Hong Kong garment behemoth TAL Apparel, the used batteries can be dissolved in water to obtain the so-called black mass of valuable metals that make up the cathodes and anodes.
GRST, a winner of this year’s Earthshot prize for innovations to tackle climate challenges, hopes to raise $50mn in the next two years to increase production at the battery plant it co-owns in Zhejiang province. In the long term, GRST hopes to lease its water-based binder and recycling technology to other battery makers.
OnTo Technology, a recycling start-up in Oregon, has started commercial tests of a water-based binder developed by scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. BASF invested in water-based binder production at two of its factories in China this year.
Partnership between BASF and Nanotech Energy will enable production of lithium-ion batteries
BASF, a globally leading battery materials producer, and Nanotech Energy, a worldwide leader in the field of graphene-based energy storage products, have agreed to partner to significantly reduce the CO2 footprint of Nanotech’s lithium-ion batteries for the North American market. The agreement aims to close the loop for lithium-ion batteries in North America, with BASF producing cathode active materials from recycled metals in Battle Creek, Michigan, for the usage in lithium-ion battery cells produced by Nanotech Energy. Feeding recycled metals into the production of new lithium-ion batteries can reduce the CO2 impact of batteries by about 25 percent compared to the use of primary metals from mines.
This 3D Printed Gripper Doesn’t Need Electronics To Function
Advanced Analytics at BASF with TrendMiner
Through an insightful case study on monitoring instrument air pressure and flare flows, Rooha Khan highlights how TrendMiner’s platform effectively optimizes manufacturing processes. Witness the tangible value BASF has discovered by harnessing the capabilities of industrial data analysis and monitoring, and be prepared to embrace the transformative possibilities of digitalization.
🖨️⚙️ Replique spins out from BASF Chemovator business incubator
Digital manufacturing firm Replique has spun out from BASF’s Chemovator business incubator after closing a late seed round. The funding round was led by STS Ventures, a leading digital technology investor, with BASF also offering support by additional funding through Chemovator.
Replique, who provides a fully encrypted 3D printing platform to facilitate spare parts management and small series production, is the fifth start-up to spin-off from Chemovator. Though it has become an independent company, it will maintain a close relationship with BASF – both its BASF 3D Printing Solutions subsidiary and the rest of its network – as a customer. The company will now focus on ‘expanding its reach and acquiring new customers in various industries’, while harnessing its latest round of funding to add new features to the Replique platform. Investment in human resources is also expected.
⚗️ Industry consortium to develop modern chemical manufacturing methods
A major consortium led by Imperial and chemical company BASF is to help make chemical manufacturing more efficient, resilient, and sustainable. Imperial will receive £17.8 million from the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and industry partners under the EPSRC Prosperity Partnership programme in a consortium of organisations from across the chemicals value chain.
“Flow chemistry is inherently more sustainable than batch processing because it makes better use of heat and materials,” said lead investigator Professor Mimi Hii from Imperial’s Department of Chemistry. “It can also provide a powerful tool for automating production and the research and development of more sustainable processes. However, there are technical bottlenecks that are holding back its full implementation. Through this new consortium we will be in a strong position to address these.”
SnAKe: Bayesian Optimization with Pathwise Exploration
Bayesian Optimization is a very effective tool for optimizing expensive black-box functions. Inspired by applications developing and characterizing reaction chemistry using droplet microfluidic reactors, we consider a novel setting where the expense of evaluating the function can increase significantly when making large input changes between iterations. We further assume we are working asynchronously, meaning we have to select new queries before evaluating previous experiments. This paper investigates the problem and introduces ‘Sequential Bayesian Optimization via Adaptive Connecting Samples’ (SnAKe), which provides a solution by considering large batches of queries and preemptively building optimization paths that minimize input costs. We investigate some convergence properties and empirically show that the algorithm is able to achieve regret similar to classical Bayesian Optimization algorithms in both synchronous and asynchronous settings, while reducing input costs significantly. We show the method is robust to the choice of its single hyper-parameter and provide a parameter-free alternative.
AI farming tool from BASF finds fertile ground in Japan's rice country
Yamazaki Rice, based near Tokyo in Saitama prefecture, began using BASF’s Xarvio Field Manager system this year with five workers on about 100 hectares of land.
Xarvio provides real-time analysis informed by satellite and weather data. Automated maps customize the amount of fertilizer recommended for each section of the farm. The data is fed to GPS-equipped farm equipment. The AI gives daily suggestions that Yamazaki Rice’s president said helped improve yields by up to 25% in some fields. Xarvio’s machine learning covers more than 10 years of crop data as well as scientific papers worldwide.
BASF Forward AM and Zortrax Forge a Long-Term 3D Printing Partnership
Zortrax has entered in a long-term partnership with BASF, the largest chemical company in the world, to further expand the range of high-quality materials compatible with its machines.
Autonomous intralogistics from indoors to outdoors for a safe and seamless logistics chain
Digitalisation at BASF: HoloLens
BASF grants Reshine a Sub-License under ANL NCM Cathode Material Patents
BASF has granted Hunan Reshine New Material Co. Ltd. (“Reshine”) a sub-license under Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) patents related to nickel-cobalt-manganese (NCM) cathode materials for long life, high energy, reliability and cost-effective lithium ion batteries. Reshine is now licensed to make, use, sell, offer to sell, distribute and import the NCM cathode materials in the U.S. market.