Lontra wins grant for ‘BladeAir’ project | Process Engineering
Summary
Midlands firm Lontra has secured a £250,000 grant from Innovate UK to develop a prototype of its Blade Compressor for application across industry. The ‘BladeAir’ project signals Lontra’s first move into the industrial compressor market worth well over £2billion per annum. It follows the Napton-based company’s success in the £600 million per annum municipal and regulated wastewater industry, where the technology was licensed to global engineering business Sulzer in a multi-million pound deal last year. “The advantage of the Blade Compressor is that it is the geometry of the design rather than advanced materials that delivers the superior performance,” said Clive Patten of Sulzer Pumps. “We therefore expect maximum reliability, which combined with the efficiency will deliver best-in-class life cycle costs.”