Atlanta, US – American Chemistry Council’s Centre for the Polyurethane Industry (CPI) opened its annual Polyurethanes Technical Conference (PTC) at the Omni Hotel at Millennium Park in Atlanta, Georgia, today. Jason Sloan – the new director of CPI – began his first PTC address with a tribute to his predecessor, Lee Salamone, who has become Senior Director across American Chemistry Council’s Plastics Division.
Sloan then introduced conference chair, BASF’s Jinghang Wu, who spoke on the evolution of the industry, saying that sustainability and circularity are not just buzzwords but have become an integral part of the industry’s mission.
Looking to the numbers, Wu noted the conference would bring us 78 presentations, 15 technical sessions, 9 travel scholars, 16 posters and 13 professional development programmes.
Wu then went on to remind the audience of this year’s 2024 Polyurethanes Innovation Award and the audience’s role in deciding the award by voting through the conference’s mobile app.
CPI Steering Committee Chair, BASF’s Dr Tobias Haber, gave a talk on embracing change. “Change can be intimidating and a catalyst for growth,” said Haber. He went on to talk about the role of AI in helping develop new formulations and in finding new directions for recycling.
In his closing thoughts, Haber said: “Innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity, not a threat.”
Sustainability and AI dominate CPI conference address
Bob Kumpf: a history of material innovation
Jason Sloan: first PTC as Director of CPI
Awards shortlist
Wu then introduced the nominees for the Polyurethanes Innovation Award.
Matthew Canoy from Huntsman gave the first presentation, about his company’s Smartlite O Liquid TPU for footwear. Canoy said Smartlite was developed to manufacture shoes with existing two-component moulding machinery, and have equivalent rebound and design characteristics to existing sports footwear, whilst also being more recyclable thanks to TPU being a thermoplastic.
Conor Wilkinson from Incorez explained his company’s Aldirez A. Incorez is a division of Sika that makes specialty additives for polyurethane coatings. The additive is designed to speed up the curing of flooring and roofing coatings, even at low temperatures. Aldirez A is a reactive linear aldimine that scavenges water, reducing the bubbling the presence of water can create in polyurethane coated surface.
Scott Beasley from Woodbridge said his company is committed to be carbon neutral by 2040. One way it hopes to achieve this is through TrimVisible BIO, which incorporates bio carbon into moulded seating foam. Beasley said: “Not only is this technology allowing us to partially replace petroleum-derived feedstock, it also allows for lower global warming potential, allowing for a more sustainable future.”
Maria Kipreos: structured data
Keynote trio
In a change from tradition, the conference began not with a keynote address but a keynote discussion about artificial intelligence (AI) between three analysts from Deloitte Consulting: Dr Bob Kumpf, Dr Maria Kipreos and Jim Eskew.
Despite the nominal change in format, the keynote did begin with presentations from the three panellists. Kumpf gave an 8000-year look back through the history of material science, noting the exponential growth that came from the transition from alchemy to the scientific method and – in recent years – the accelerated scientific method (Kumpf cited the work on Gorilla Glass by Corning Glass for Apple as an example of this).
Kipreos spoke on how AI could potentially fill the gap in the first steps of R&D. She said we should think of AI as an engine to compare and clean up data, preventing chemical companies from reinventing the wheel and redoing experiments that have previously been conducted, or preventing labs in two countries from working on the same experiments simultaneously. She also noted that AI could be used to plug the knowledge gap caused by the large-scale early retirement taken by many senior scientists in the industry because of the Covid pandemic.
Eskew continued on the adoption of AI in material informatics. An interpretation of unstructured data using large language models (LLMs) to extract, categorise and synthesise useful information. He showed how an R&D Digital Assistant can help scientists to streamline the research process by calling up and analysing data including patent applications, chains of internal communication, and related areas of research.
The session concluded with a Q&A session with members of the audience submitting questions through their smart devices to the panel of Kumpf, Kipreos and Eskew.
The Polyurethanes Technical Conference continues at the Omni Hotel at Millennium Park, Atlanta, until Wednesday 2 October. The winner of the Polyurethanes Innovation Award will be announced at a gala lunch on Wednesday.
