A core segment for Olive & Branch M&D is the specialty chemicals segment, and when I started the company 1.5 years ago, I did, and continue to do today, a lot of research and product development work, as part of the process of building my specialty chemical product portfolio. I knew from experience, and I am also of the belief that Research & Development (R&D) had to be a key activity I did, since a main strategic objective of mine was to drive innovation. So, starting off, I focused heavily on R&D, even though some of my friends and associates were encouraging me to focus more on buying and reselling products. However, for a new company seeking to serve the needs of the oil and gas, construction, and water treatment industries, having a heavy focus on product resale comes with its own challenges, which I’ll probably elaborate on in a future blog post.
A majority of the research I do is focused on finding information on raw materials or components I’ll need to use, to put together a product formulation that will provide the features or meet the requirements the product being developed needs to have. This type of research can include reading books and articles on various intermediate and finished materials/products; and surfing the web to find anything that may help. If you know where to look, one can find complete formulations for example on household cleaning products. Only in very rare cases are you able to find a formulation for a specialty chemical product, used for example in the oil and gas industry, that’s close to a complete formula and doesn’t require a lot of work to optimize. You may find bits and pieces of a formulation, but hardly ever the entire formulation. What I encounter as well with some books and a lot of articles I come across online, are starting formulations put together in the Lab, that are very difficult to reproduce or put into practice. Then there’s intellectual property (IP) – areas, raw materials, formulations, etc., you can’t touch, due to IP infringement issues. So, for me, and for many formulators I’m sure, the goal with formulation R&D is to find the best-available materials and guides that will help in putting together a product formulation that meets requirements, and that hopefully differentiates the finished product from the competition.
Often, I find myself identifying raw materials or components that should work well together in a formulation, and through trial and error in the Lab, selecting a couple formulations to take forward for additional testing. I may start with one or two components, but the final formulation may have 5 or 6 components. An oil and gas application I provide specialty chemical products for is Cementing. Cement slurry designs used in Cementing can include a multitude of products/additives to meet job requirements and be suitable for wellbore conditions. Part of the work involved in R&D when putting together product formulations for use in cement slurries, is making sure the final product formulation is compatible with various types of cement, and with various other additives that can be added to the cement slurry. You want the product you’re providing to have a synergistic rather than an antagonistic relationship with all components of the cement slurry.
What has helped me the most on my product development journey, thus far, that I’ve been very appreciative of, is people who have been in the business a long time willing to help me and sharing their knowledge with me. Gained knowledge and experience in the specialty chemical product development space is a crucial benefit to have, and one that can determine success or failure of a product or company. So, this got me thinking, are there expert systems around and available that possibly incorporate artificial intelligence (AI), that can be used by formulators to significantly reduce and optimize the R&D process for specialty chemicals? I imagined a software program having a data base of raw materials, the physical and chemical properties of the materials, their interactions – compatibilities and incompatibilities with other chemicals, etc., etc., and a user input system (preferably an “expert system”) whereby users can enter specifics about the product they are trying to develop, the application the product will be used for, and based on the inputs, the software program spits out starting potential workable formulations that can then be optimized. I envisioned the system also having the capability to capture usage information, and results after a formulation has been used, so that eventually using that information, the AI system will be able to recommend specific and targeted results that will be of real benefit to formulators, especially novice formulators. Unfortunately, after some research of formulation software programs, I found that while there are formulation Apps available the Apps are limited in scope and mostly geared to specific areas of chemistry, e.g., polymer chemistry, and specific industries and applications, e.g., the agriculture, and personal and home care industries, and the coatings application, as examples. I could not find available software programs to help me with the areas and applications I was focused on.
What I gather from looking into software programs that were available to help formulators, is that some companies did try to cast a big net and use Big Data and AI for formulation software that covered multiple areas of chemistry, however, they quickly found that the chemicals space was too large for such an approach to be effective. So, the objective turned to focusing on specific areas of chemistry or science, for example polymers or nanomaterials, and building formulation tools to assist formulators operating in those specific areas and helping them reduce the time it takes to arrive at a workable starting formulation, after which they can use their own knowledge and skills to optimize the formulation, to meet agreed upon requirements.
If you know of a formulation software that can be beneficial in my line of work, reach out to me with some information about it, and I’ll investigate it.
July 17th, 2022.
By Lennox
Olive & Branch M&D