Sugar beets a path to innovation
A SCOTTISH company has developed a material made from sugar beet waste and believes the sky is the limit — literally. Cellucomp says its Curran product is twice as strong as carbon fibre and could one day be used to make the wings of aircraft.
Curran was invented by Cellucomp co-founders Dr David Hepworth and Dr Eric Whale, Edinburgh-based scientists looking to create a composite to rival carbon fibre.
Having proved the principle of Curran’s strength by making a commercially available flyfishing rod, they have since concentrated their efforts on developing a product for the paints and coatings industry.
According to Cellucomp CE Christian Kemp-Griffin, Curran’s physical strength, combined with its viscosity when added to liquids and composites, make it unique.
“Curran is a material that is derived from nanocellulose particles — root vegetables,” says Kemp-Griffin. “When you get down to that very, very small size you actually get incredible strength properties.
“When we put the resulting product that we have into other products, as an additive that goes into other products, it adds strength to those products, as well as adding viscosity, and there is no other product that will do both things at the same time.”
Curran is Gaelic for carrot, the first root vegetable Whale and Hepworth experimented with, due to its availability in shops. They moved on to sugar beet, due to the sheer volume of extracted waste in factories from sugar production.
About 20% of world sugar is derived from sugar beet.
Wood is used by other nanocellulose makers, but Hepworth prefers beet because it grows quickly and breaks down easily, and as most of the plant is wasted, there is a positive environmental impact.
“It takes less energy to produce this material than it would to make nanocellulose from something else, like trees, so we’re trying to do this in a very energy-minimising way, which is good for the environment and it’s good for us because it saves costs of production,” says Hepworth.
“We can potentially produce a cost-effective material and that opens a number of markets.”
The firm has a new factory just outside Edinburgh that is able to produce 400 tonnes of Curran powder per year, a large amount considering how little is needed in any product.
It makes up less than 1% of the ingredients of the paint developed by Curran and paint company Whitson’s. Cellucomp wants to expand production to 2,000 tonnes annually within three years, having received much interest internationally from large manufacturers.
“The feedstock that we use is from a sidestream from the sugar-producing industry,” says Hepworth. “It’s the waste pulp that comes after they’ve removed the sugar, which is then pressed and dried into pellets for ease of shipment. The dried pellets can be used as a low-grade cattle feed, but we want to take this material and turn it into something that has a lot more value.”
Hepworth says although sugar beet factories, mainly in Europe, create large amounts of waste pellets, they are looking into other natural materials from which fibre could be extracted, such as potatoes and palm fruit.
Curran can be used for hundreds of applications. “It can go into things like paint and coatings; it can go into concrete and cosmetics. It can even be used for drilling fluids, as an additive to go into your food, and go into composites. So you can imagine one day airplane wings made from Curran,” Kemp-Griffin says.
Arguably the largest current market for Curran is the £2bn paint and coating additives industry. Cellucomp has linked up with Whitson to create a new range of paints, set to go on the market shortly.
Founder Cait Whitson says adding Curran to her paint has had many benefits, in addition to being environmentally friendly. Curran makes up 0.6% of her paint’s ingredients.
“One of the things that excited me about the Curran product was that a very small amount of it adds a significant amount of durability to the paint product,” Whitson says. “Secondly, the rheology — how the paint flows from the brush or the roller, what it is like to use. I wanted a paint that can be used over any substrate, however sucky or dry or very absorbent. That has really come out with Curran."
Whitson says Curran helps make paint scrub-resistant, avoids unsightly brush marks and prevents cracking.
Cellucomp has received big financial backing from the Scottish government and its economic development offshoot Scottish Enterprise, and believes it could become a billion-pound company.
The firm is investigating the use of Curran to reinforce recycled paper.
It adds strength and viscosity; no other product does both as the same time