MEPI: Process Innovation Serving New Chemical Manufacturing Strategies
Following the AZF fertilizer plant blast in 2001, a brain-storming group was formed in Toulouse, France, to draw the lines of what would in 2007 become MEPI, la Maison Européenne des Procédés Innovants.
Built on the excellent academic knowledge of the INPT (Toulouse Polytechnics), powered by its founding members, grounded on the premises of the SAFRAN SME space chemicals site in Toulouse, MEPI aims at promoting flow chemistries in a novel approach using production equipments that are already commercially available.
MEPI offers feasibility and optimization studies, training, and assistance for process implementation.
Process intensification allows for the use of powerful reagents, running highly exothermic reactions in full safety. The reduction of reagent excess, solvents or impurities generation create cost savings by a better energy consumption and lesser impact on the environment.
"Having access to a massive variety of equipments allows MEPI to offer unique combined solutions using different technologies to solve our customers' challenges," said Laurent Pichon, business birector at MEPI. "Our clients are not only coming for costs reductions, but often because running their productions in a batch mode do not comply with their quality and safety targets."
With these new technologies, chemists can shorten their multi-step syntheses, reduce development time and recover a large degree of creativity in manufactures.
In addition, MEPI is also crossing novel chemical engineering and novel chemistries like intensified biocatalysed reactions or extractions using ionic liquids.
MEPI serve a wide range of markets, like specialty chemicals, agrochemicals, polymers, cosmetics and also pharmaceuticals where producing with a strict quality control and close to the needs at decent cost appears to become more and more crucial.
MEPI is designing new ways of manufacturing that are cleaner, safer, purer and cheaper, to fuel the future of the chemical industry.
