engleski

Chromatography as a basis for the spin off company dealing with advanced water treatment technologies

Nowadays, mainstream opinion makers consider spin off companies as a valid measure of knowledge and technology transfer potential. Spinning off is a complex process consi-ting of incubation (establishment of a spin off company in a startup phase) and acceleration (establishment of a fully functionalized spin off company). It is aimed at transforming research into an innovative product to meet the needs of the market. Therefore it is only natural that a research tackling ion chromatographic (IC) separation in water-borne samples evolves through its multistage phases into a spin off company dealing with not only chromatography but with advanced water treatment technologies. This lecturure will discuss each stage. The incubation stage was based on development of IC methodology for analysis of aqueous samples. Due to the fact that different kinds of analysis of water-based samples needs different (usually) IC methodology, instant achievement of fair separation and fast analys is proved to be very important. Subsequent research was focused on development of retention models, peak shape models, optimization methodology in both isocratic and gradient mode, all by using advanced numerical procedures, up to the application of artificial neural networks (ANN) and genetic algorithms (GA). The results showed good application potential and developed algorithms were routinely used in our laboratories for analysis of pharmaceutical industry samples. This point proved to mark the end of the incubation stage and a decision for establishing spin off company was made. The shareholders of spin off company are completely institutional: 20% is owned by the University of Zagreb and 80% by the Faculty of Chemical Engineering and Technology (Faculty). One person is employed on a full time basis and auxiliary services and separation consultants are outsourced. Offices, laboratories and instruments are leased from the Faculty. Special care was taken not to have conflict of interest in the mutual relations and additional law specialist was consulted therefore. First year tumover was around 50, 000 EUR what was enough to create firm basis to justify expansion into additional research areas and acceleration of the company. From the research point of view, acceleration was achieved by analysis of more complex pharmaceutical samples such as complex wood sugars and its residuals and development of quantitative structure propelty relationship (QSPR) models for prediction of separation of new components. This included introducing fuzzy logic (FL) into the modeling and development of hybrid GA-ANN-FL models. Since developed models proved to be valid, the QSPR modeling approach was transferred to the development of advanced oxidation processes (AOP) for removing emerging contaminants in water samples which finally resulted in construction and installation of several water treatment pilot plants. Incorporation of new research results into the spin off routine operation brought tumover up to the margin of 40% increase. This point can be considered as the end of the acceleration process.

CHROMATOGRAPHY, SPIN OFF COMPANY, ADVANCED WATER TREATMENT TECHNOLOGIES

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