Engineering news
Lontra, the company responsible for the blade compressor, has been awarded €50,000 (£39,000) through the EU’s Horizon 2020 fund to support its ascension into new markets as well as the development of new technology.
The Warwickshire-based company has become one of the first recipients of the Horizon 2020 grant this year, a funding scheme designed to support small and medium-sized enterprises as they expand their activities into new markets.
With a funding pot of €3 billion from 2014-2020, the Horizon 2020 grant targets SMEs with the highest potential to develop groundbreaking products, solutions and processes that are ready to face the global market.
Having already secured early sales with Severn Trent Water and Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water, and licensed to global leader Sulzer to roll-out the Blade Compressor as part of their product offering, Lontra will now have the resource required to introduce its Blade Compressor to multiple new industries.
In 2016 Lontra will set its sights on the food and pharmaceutical sectors, two of the UK’s largest manufacturing export sectors worth a combined £38 billion, to replace outdated and inefficient pneumatic conveying low pressure compressor (blower) systems.
Lontra’s goal in 2016 will be to address the current problems of high energy use and high maintenance costs that the food and pharmaceutical markets endure through use of traditional oil-free blowers, by replacing them with its Blade Compressor technology.
Steve Lindsey, founder and chief executive of Lontra, said: “Being awarded with this grant proves the huge successes we have achieved over the past two years and thanks to our highly capable team, those successes are only going to continue. The food and pharmaceutical sectors are hugely lucrative for British export trade and are our primary targets for 2016, but both use outdated blower technology, meaning Britain is losing significant chunks of money every year.
"Following testing of our Blade Compressor, Severn Trent’s then chief executive Tony Wray said that they would save £1.8 million a year in electricity costs if Lontra’s technology was deployed across all of the company’s wastewater works. The Blade Compressor has now successfully ran for 10,000 hours, the equivalent of more than three years of normal operation, without issue. These superior results could be achieved in the food and pharmaceutical sectors too, but this will require the men and women at the top of these types of organisations to be open to bringing in modern innovations, which could save millions of pounds every year.”
Meanwhile, the company is set to open its new technology centre in Warwickshire; a significant investment in the UK’s engineering infrastructure.