Organisational Profile

perlemax limited

Perlemax is a spinout company from the University of Sheffield, founded in 2010, with the mission to commercialise the research outputs from the research of Prof. Will Zimmerman (winner of the 2010 Royal Society Innovation Award for energy efficient microbubble generation). Perlemax won the UK 2010 CleanTech Open and was a finalist for the first two applications – wastewater aeration and microalgae bioreactor sequestration of CO2. Subsequent patents filed by Perlemax include microbubble isothermal distillation, microflotation (used in algal bloom harvesting / dewatering) and CO2-rich microbubbles for more than doubling the rate of biogas production from anaerobic bioreactors.  Perlemax has a range of commercial development partners, where they hold the application specific expertise and PMX focuses on developing the enabling technologies. PMX has license agreements on wastewater aeration, algal bioreactor dosing with CO2 rich exhaust gas, cleaning and H2 fuel cell regeneration through microbubbles with commercial partners.  Development projects:  Enhanced Biofuel Production via Integrated Microbubble Technology (InnovateUK IB Catalyst, £2.2m), Z-Fuels (Innovate UK, €2.3m ERA-IB), ammonia stripping from leachate (Viridor, £55k current feasibility study); pending £270k pilot scale trial), ammonia stripping and aeration for aquaculture (Innovate UK, £127k), Enhancing the Methane Generation from Food Waste Anaerobic Digestion Mediated by Fluidic Oscillator Generated Microbubbles (Innovate UK, £199k) and Durable plasma reactor electrodes with nanoceramic coating (Innovate UK, £105k)