The UK Government is committed to moving to a zero-carbon economy, including within the most energy-intensive sectors. These sectors consume a considerable amount of energy, but also play an essential role in delivering the UK's transition to a sustainable, low-carbon economy, as well as in contributing to economic growth and rebalancing the economy. UK Foundation Industries generate 10% of the UK's entire CO2 emissions and for three of these industries, glass, cement and ceramics, manufacture is energy and capital intensive.

Future environmental regulations create challenges in competing with new plants from the developing world but also offer new opportunities. COVID-19 impact resulted in near total suspension of foundation industry production. Subsequent recovery is further challenged by new, UK policies and plummeting raw material values which are compounding negative impact to decimated sectors.

This energy efficiency industrial research project aims to deliver a transformative new instrument for the glass, cement and ceramics industries, utilising analytical Raman gas measurement instrumentation, originally developed for nuclear decommissioning by project lead IS-Instruments. The data provided by the instrument will enable these Foundation Industries and others, to make a step-change in process control, energy consumption and environmental emissions monitoring.

Significant energy savings will be directly enabled through accurate, near-to-real-time hot gas measurement, realising the future potential of mixing natural gas with cleaner energy sources such as hydrogen, when combined with more accurate and near-to-real-time burner in-process control. The optimised environmental monitoring capability of this instrument will enable greater understanding and the value added by additional in-process monitoring technologies will deliver a new technology enabling step changes to prcessing within the foundation industries.

To deliver this collaborative, innovative project, IS-Instruments will be supported by UK Foundation Industry partners Glass Technology Services (Glass), Breedon Group (Cement) and Wienerberger (Ceramics) with world class University expertise from Southampton's Optoelectronics Research Centre and Sheffield Hallam's Materials Engineering Research Institute.