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Collaboration between Imperial College Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Surgery led to the development of active constraint robot solutions which augment surgeon skills so that joint replacement components are implanted accurately and successfully. This led to the founding of Acrobot to develop innovative surgical technologies. Acrobot was acquired by Stanmore Implants Worldwide in 2010. An orthopaedic stereotaxic instrument, based on Imperial research, obtained US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearance in 2013. This has led to Mako-Surgical purchasing Stanmore Implants Acrobot technology in April 2013.
Novel vapour sorption experimental methods for the characterisation of complex particulate materials have been developed in the Department of Chemical Engineering. This research and expertise resulted in the creation of Surface Measurement Systems Limited (SMS), whose Dynamic Vapour Sorption (DVS) and Inverse Gas Chromatography (IGC) instruments are now found in >500 laboratories around the world. They are recognised standard research and development tools in the global pharmaceutical industry (DIN 66138). SMS has contributed >270 man-years of employment and generated £27M of turnover, whilst SMS instruments have generated over £300M of economic value, over the REF period.
The SAFT-VR family of thermodynamic models has made it possible to predict reliably the behaviour of the many complex and challenging fluids that are found across a range of industrial sectors, including oil & gas, chemicals (refrigerants, surfactants, polymers), energy (carbon capture solvents, carbon dioxide-rich streams) and pharmaceuticals.
The SAFT-VR models have had a wide impact on industrial practice. At BP, they have been used to design novel surfactants that have increased the lifetime of oil fields up to five-fold, avoiding maintenance interventions costing millions of dollars and increasing productivity by 50% (worth $2-3 million per year per well). At Borealis, they have been used to understand how to increase the productivity of the reactor in the flagship Borstar process by 30%. At ICI and Ineos/Mexichem, they have been used to design efficient processes for producing replacement refrigerants with much reduced reliance on extreme and expensive experiments involving hydrogen fluoride, a highly corrosive substance. Industrial demand for access to the predictive capabilities of SAFT-VR has been such that Imperial College has licensed the software in 2013 to a UK SME in order to distribute it worldwide to users.
Mineral separation by froth flotation is the largest tonnage separation process in the world, and is used to recover the very small fraction (<0.5%) of valuable mineral from the mined ore. Typically, 5-15% of the valuable minerals are not recovered due to sub-optimal process settings, most important of which is the air rate. A methodology to determine the optimal air rate range to use, Peak Air Recovery (PAR), was developed by the Froth and Foam Research Group at Imperial College London.
Anglo American Platinum produces 40% of the world's platinum. They use the PAR methodology on all their flotation plants to establish to air rate control limits, tightening the operating range and improving the separation performance. Rio Tinto annually produce 300 000 tons of copper and 500 000 oz gold from their Kennecott Copper mine. They have implemented PAR as a control strategy, and statistical comparative tests have shown an increase in copper and gold recovery from this mine alone of the order of 1%, with a nominal value of approximately $30m per annum.
A US$1.5 billion clean coal project at the YiHe Coal Field in Inner Mongolia was established in June 2011 as a joint venture between UK based Seamwell International Ltd and the state-owned China Energy Conservation and Environmental Protection Group. This is the first commercial project to employ the novel "Linear UCG Gasifier" design developed specifically for use under extremely weak underground roof conditions by Durucan, Korre and Shi at Imperial College London. Underground gasification under such conditions is made possible solely because of the novel gasifier design, which has opened up the potential to transform over 720 million tonnes of coal resource, that would otherwise have remained trapped, as a clean coal energy source for the next 20 years.
The Anglo-Scandinavian Cardiac Outcomes Trial (ASCOT; Co-Chairman, Professor Sever) was an investigator designed and led multinational study in which different blood pressure-lowering and lipid-lowering treatment strategies were investigated in an attempt to define optimal programmes for intervention to prevent cardiovascular disease in hypertensive subjects. The outcomes of both the antihypertensive arm and the lipid arm of the trial defined the benefits of more contemporary treatments for hypertensive subjects, including calcium channel blockers, angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors and statins, which have been incorporated into national and international guidelines (including NICE), and have impacted on current clinical practice in the prevention of cardiovascular disease worldwide.
The impact of educational research from the Rothschild Centre for Clinical Simulation and Education Research (RCSER) at Imperial College London has progressed from the development and validation of simulators and skill assessment, through to shaping guidelines for training curricula and continued professional development in the NHS and beyond. This body of multidisciplinary research brings together Imperial's contributions in simulation science, skills assessment, performance-shaping factors, educational theory and surgical practice to contribute to national and international healthcare education and policy. The work impacts upon clinical practice at regional, national and international levels, with far-reaching implications for the quality and safety of patient care.
In recent years there has been an explosion of real data from areas as diverse as bioinformatics, genetics, engineering and finance. Coupled with this has been the development of complex and realistic Bayesian statistical models to represent these data. In order to use these models to perform (Bayesian) statistical inference, one is required to calculate integrals, which are unknown analytically. Most of the numerical methods used to approximate these integrals are based upon Monte Carlo methods of which some of the seminal work has been done at Imperial College London, for instance the `particle-filter' developed in 1993 [4]. These methods are now very widely used in finance for automated trading, calculating the probability of default for economies, and for target tracking in the defence sector and we give explicit exemplars of each. The numerical methods developed at Imperial have been important in applying realistic models to these varied application areas and have impacted companies and organisations as diverse as Maple-Leaf Capital LLC, QinetiQ and the Credit Research Initiative.
We demonstrate a strong influence on the design of the read head used in the present state-of-the-art hard-disk drive (HDD) first produced commercially in 2008. This much improved read head, enabling disk storage density to increase by a factor of 5 to around 1 Tbit/in2, relies crucially on a magnetic tunnel junction with a MgO barrier whose huge tunneling magnetoresistance was predicted theoretically in a 2001 paper co-authored by Dr A. Umerski [1], the RA on one of our EPSRC-funded research grants. This prediction relied on techniques developed by us over many years, specifically in refs [2] and [3]. Such magnetic tunnel junctions are used in all computer HDDs manufactured today with predicted sales in 2012 amounting to more than $28 billion [section 5, source A].
Bio Nano Consulting (http://www.bio-nano-consulting.com) was established as an operating business in 2007 through a joint venture between Imperial College London and UCL, whose formation was underpinned by research produced by Professor Tony Cass's group at Imperial. The company is the first consultancy in Europe to focus on the increasingly important intersection between bio- and nanotechnology, and it facilitates the development and commercialisation of new biomedical and nanotechnology-based techniques. Since its start-up, the company has attracted numerous clients across the aerospace and diagnostics sectors, including Lockheed-Martin and [text removed for publication]. The company's activities have generated £6M worth of revenue and it has a growing portfolio. The company, which is based in London, currently has 8 full time employees.