Yorkshire businesses on producing new energy sources amid climate change

Yorkshire firms tell Fiona Haran about how they are breaking new ground with their products and processes and, into the bargain, being kinder to the planet.

"The global industry wastes as much low-temperature heat as it takes to power the United States of America,” says Jon Fenton, chief executive and founder of Elland-based green energy business FeTu.

“In the 90 seconds it took me to tell you that, there’s as much energy hitting the Earth from the sun as humanity uses in a year.”

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“Let’s not forget the 44 billion gigawatts that the Earth is constantly generating and radiating,” he continues. “We do not have energy problems. We have problems accessing abundant low-temperature energy sources.”

FeTu, founded in 2016, has developed technology that enables industrial firms to recover their waste heat from temperatures as low as 40C and convert it into electricity at unprecedented new efficiencies, slashing energy costs and carbon emissions.

“It makes energy deprivation a thing of the past,” Fenton says. “Enabling commercially compelling power generation below 100C at these new efficiency levels introduces a brand new weapon against climate change.”

Fenton developed an interest in mechanical design at a young age. “My personal journey began at 13 years-old when an elderly gentleman whose garden I tended told me that one day I must create a more efficient engine. Thirty years later, the technology came to me in the shower and I’ve been committed to it since 2016.”

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The company has recently invested £1.5m in a new Huddersfield manufacturing base to meet demand from industrial manufacturers and other businesses for its product. The new facility will enable FeTu, which employs 15 people and is currently recruiting additional manufacturing engineers, to produce the components of its energy motor in house, ensuring quality and reducing delays from outsourcing essential parts.

Fenton says: “The cost, speed of delivery, and quality of the parts we outsourced from our UK supply chain didn’t meet our requirements and were stifling the rollout of our pilot programme, so we decided to take control of the manufacturing process ourselves.”

FeTu has secured over £12m in sponsorship, investment and grants since its inception. The firm’s new manufacturing arm will enable the commercial rollout of its clean energy technology to a wide range of blue-chip industrial partners that are taking part in a pilot programme launching this autumn.

“We’re building a portfolio of information so the big players can licence our technology and make it into a mass market,” says Fenton. “We’ve been on this heat-to-power technology journey for the last three years. We’ve found that the end users have such a passion for change which is underpinned by legislation and taxation.

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“Everyone is aware that there is a far more draconian carbon taxation coming at some point, but the answers haven’t been there,” he continues. “They are desperate for something that addresses their business needs but also gives them a practical return on investment. We’re in a really exciting space with an incredible opportunity.”

Fibre Extrusion Technology (FET), based on Gelderd Road in Leeds, designs, develops and manufactures extrusion equipment for a wide range of textile material applications worldwide.

The company, which was founded in 1998, specialises in small-scale production machines. Its growing R&D (research and development) team of ten scientists and engineers performs and assists with trials requested by customers, alongside new process developments.

FET is increasing its profile in the medical sector, with a range of medical technology components, services and production equipment. This includes turnkey solutions for nonwoven medical devices, wound care and dressings, and synthetic absorbable sutures.

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R&D manager Dr Jonny Hunter says: “The FET team found that small-scale systems would be useful for high-value, low-volume products, such as dissolvable and implantable sutures, which you need a fibre to produce.

“The scale of our system is perfect because sutures are sold by the metre and you only need a machine that can make the quantity that you need for the whole year, which could be 10,000 metres, rather than a massive machine that can do millions of metres. This enables precision while meeting the tight requirements [of the fibre] to go inside the human body.”

FET has successfully processed over 100 different polymer types and its systems can melt-spin resorbable polymers in multifilament, monofilament and nonwoven formats, collaborating with specialists globally. “We’ve developed a system called a meltblown production line which allows you to make a nonwoven web,” Hunter says. “Typically, meltblown systems need quite low viscosity polymers to be able to make a product. Our system allows much higher viscosity materials to be meltblown into a product.”

“We’ve been able to show that all the same materials we use to make sutures or implantable products can be put into our meltblown system,” he continues. “That’s really impactful, because if you know that a polymer is biocompatible, being able to make it into a nonwoven in a single step has vast cost savings and is low risk. Equally, it allows you to open up a plethora of new products using the same materials.”

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FET works with other industries as well, including aerospace, automotive and technical textiles for flame protection. An area of future innovation is gel and wet-spinning trials.

“We’ve launched a new system that allows you to do small-scale production of wet-spinning processes,” says Hunter. “This involves taking a material and putting it through a coagulation solution, where a chemical reaction occurs to form a fibre. It is ATEX-rated [safe for use in explosive atmospheres] and can handle really high viscous materials.”

FET has also developed a process that enables the reduction of fossil fuels. “A lot of our customers are requesting small-scale production of a material called ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene (UHMWPE), which commonly goes by the brand names of Dyneema or Spectra,” Hunter says.

“For instance, to produce a ton of finished yarn a year you might need around a million litres of petrol-like material, which has a high carbon footprint. Our patented process brings that down to zero.”

This article first appeared in The Yorkshire Post’s sister title Insider Yorkshire

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