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EPSRC is the main UK government agency for funding high-quality basic, strategic and applied research and related postgraduate training in engineering and the physical sciences, to help the nation exploit the next generation of technological change. It invests more than £800 million a year in a broad range of subjects – from mathematics to materials science, and from information technology to structural engineering.

www.epsrc.ac.uk

MATERIALS FOR A SMARTER FUTURE

Other statements in the seriesLASER VISION

LIGHT FANTASTIC

THE WONDER STUFF

1960’s The University of Southampton began research into optical communications in the Optical Fibre Group, work that has been supported by EPSRC for more than 40 years.

1989 The EPSRC-funded Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC), led by future Marconi Award winner, Professor David Payne, was set up at Southampton. It is now a leading centre

for photonics, optical telecommunication and high-power lasers, supporting a £10 billion UK industry that employs 70,000 people. The centre has since created over 10 successful spin-out companies and over 500 jobs, and files at least 20 patents a year. It has also led to multiple academic-industrial partnerships.

2004 ChG Southampton Ltd, a spin-out company from the ORC, was formed - an optical glass and fibre supplier specialising in cutting-edge materials for a wide range of emerging applications.

2005 ORC spin-out company SPI Lasers, which manufactures high power fibre lasers, was floated on AIM, creating 150 jobs with a valuation of £40 million.

2010 EPSRC strengthened its collaboration with Southampton with the launch of the Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Photonics, under the leadership of David Payne.

2012 Photonics industry celebrates 25 years of the Erbium Doped Fibre Amplifier (EDFA).

2012 Fibrecore, a spin-out company from the ORC, celebrated 30 years as a manufacturer and supplier of speciality optical fibres.

2013 David Payne is knighted in the Queen’s New Year Honours awards and the University of Southampton celebrates 60 years of photonics and its links to EPSRC.

1960’s Professor Colin Humphreys, began research into gallium nitride (GaN). With EPSRC funding, he and his team developed a new way to make GaN for use in light emitting diodes (LEDs). Instead of growing GaN on costly sapphire wafers, the team devised a way to grow it on far cheaper silicon wafers. The LED technology developed by the team has the potential to cut the proportion of UK electricity used for

lights from 20 per cent to 5 per cent. Global adoption would result in annual CO2 savings equivalent to the output of all the cars on the planet.

2000 The EPSRC-funded Cambridge Centre for Gallium Nitride was launched. Led by Professor Colin Humphreys, the centre has been underpinned by EPSRC funding for over 10 years. Industrial partners include, QinetiQ, Sharp Europe and Philips.

2010 The centre’s GaN LED technology helped AIXTRON to achieve sales of over £800 million.

2011 The Cambridge team began a collaboration with UK semiconductor manufacturer Plessey which paves the way for the UK manufacture of affordable energy-efficient LED light bulbs.

2013 Professor Humphreys began supplying the University of Strathclyde with GaN LED structures on silicon for their work on Wi-Fi like internet communications.

2004 ‘miracle material’ graphene was first isolated during ‘blue-sky’ experiments, by EPSRC-supported University of Manchester scientists Professor André Geim and Dr Konstantin Novoselov. Graphene is the lightest, strongest and most conductive material known to man. Potential uses for graphene include consumer electronics, flexible touch screens, sensors, composite materials, fuel cells and aircraft components.

2010 Geim and Novoselov were awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize for Physics for their work with graphene.

2011 In collaboration with researchers at the University of Cambridge Geim and Novoselov showed a 20-fold enhancement in harvesting light using graphene, which could pave the way for advances in high-speed internet.

2011 The UK Government announced a £50 million investment

to establish the UK as a global graphene research hub, with £38 million allocated to The University of Manchester to build the National Graphene Institute (NGI) and additional funding secured from the European Regional Development Fund.

2012 A further commitment for research into enhancing the ‘manufacturability’ of graphene was made, and Geim and Novoselov are knighted in the New Years’ Honours List.

2013 Work begins on the NGI and Bluestone Global Tech agrees a £5 million collaborative research partnership with The University of Manchester, becoming the first strategic partner of the NGI.

Engineering and Physical SciencesResearch Council

“It’s very important to us that our research will be exploited here in the UK. We made a deliberate decision to let Plessey commercialise our research since they planned to manufacture in Plymouth, Devon, the LEDs we had developed in our research. This way, we can create more jobs in a low-employment part of the country and potentially turn Britain into a major centre for better, greener lighting.”Professor Sir Colin Humphreys, on his team’s R&D and collaboration with UK manufacturer Plessey

“The National Graphene Institute is fundamentally important to continue the world-class graphene research started in Manchester. Our researchers and scientists will be able to collaborate with colleagues from other universities and from some of the world’s leading companies, which can only serve to enhance scientific research.” Professor Kostya Novoselov

“Research into advanced materials is expanding possibilities in many areas of science and engineering. The UK is in a strong technical position and we must make the most of these new developments. This is why we recently announced £30 million of EPSRC support for existing advanced materials research.” David Willetts, Minister for Universities and Science

“Many of Rolls-Royce’s partnerships involve EPSRC-supported students in the UK, resulting in the training and development of highly skilled individuals [who] make a significant contribution to the UK’s technology base.” Mark Jefferies, Rolls-Royce

Future skills

EPSRC is committed to training the next generation of research leaders, and is investing £350 million in Centres for Doctoral Training (CDT). This investment builds on the success of the existing CDT model, with around a quarter of the existing Centres relevant to advanced materials. EPSRC also sponsors students through the Doctoral Training Grant and Industrial CASE, with around 320 students supported in advanced materials through these routes and 45 of these are collaborative with industry.

Research priorities

•Low energy electronics and photonics (current portfolio £37 million)

Potential applications include energy efficient computing and improved battery life for portable electronics for the telecommunications, electronics and defence sectors.

•Materials for energy (current portfolio £35 million)

EPSRC is leading research in this field, which includes the dismantling of old chemical and nuclear installations and in the development of new materials that meet the needs of the nuclear and chemical industry as well as other sectors in energy, building and construction.

•Advanced composites (current portfolio £36 million)

Areas include recycling composites, rapid manufacturing and biologically compatible composites, with applications across the aerospace, automotive, sport and leisure and energy sectors.

•High performance metals and alloys (current portfolio £43 million)

Relevant to the needs of the automotive, aerospace and construction sectors to improve longevity, re-use and “lightweighting”.

•Materials for health (current portfolio £52 million)

Including materials for enhanced imaging technologies, safer carriers

for drugs and low-cost efficient manufacturing in sectors such

as healthcare technologies, medical devices and

regenerative medicine.

Materials for manufacturing

There is an intimate relationship between materials discovery and characterisation through to innovative production and manufacturing. The UK’s high value manufacturing capability is critically reliant on advanced materials and material innovations3 with advanced materials playing a key part in the Government’s Industrial Strategy. Global companies such as Johnson Matthey, with significant UK presence, rely on materials to maintain their competitive advantage. The potential for growth is high with additional market values around £55 billion expected over the next five to seven years4. The EPSRC Centres for Innovative Manufacturing, alongside the High Value Manufacturing Catapult of the Technology Strategy Board, are an integral part of the UK Government’s strategy to support high value manufacturing in the UK. The EPSRC Centres explore the research challenges of importance to UK industries and seek appropriate collaborations with the academic and industrial base to maintain and strengthen the excellence of high-value manufacturing in the UK.

For example, EPSRC’s Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Liquid Metal Engineering at Brunel University is developing innovative technologies for the reuse and recycling of metal that will lead to substantial conservation of natural resources, reduction in energy consumption and CO2 emissions. Professor Zhongyun Fan2, who leads the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Liquid Metal Engineering explains: “Our task isn’t simply to develop advanced manufacturing technologies - it’s also to stimulate new attitudes to metals within industry, at government level and throughout society.

Working in partnership

EPSRC-sponsored researchers in advanced materials have a high level of engagement with industry sharing knowledge and skills through research partnerships with major corporations such as Rolls-Royce, Nokia and Jaguar Land Rover. Leverage from industrial partnerships has accounted for an additional £82 million of advanced materials research investment over the last five years, helping reduce the time required to bring discoveries to market.

Key partner: the Technology Strategy Board:

EPSRC works closely with the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) on jointly-funded research projects and collaborations including the Innovation and Knowledge Centre, SPECIFIC (Sustainable Product Engineering Centre for Innovative Functional Industrial Coatings) which aims to speed up the commercialisation of innovative industrial coatings, creating a whole new manufacturing sector and new business opportunities. EPSRC’s research priorities align closely with the TSB’s Engineering and Technology Strategy with strong interdependency in the field of high value manufacturing. An example of this partnership in action is the High Value Manufacturing Catapult, overseen by the TSB, which focuses on accelerating the development of new products, processes and services to commercial reality, thereby creating a sustainable high value manufacturing future for the UK. The majority of the seven centres that make up the High Value Manufacturing Catapult are supported by EPSRC including the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (University of Sheffield), National

Composites Centre University of Bristol and Warwick Manufacturing Group (University of Warwick).

The Catapult builds on the UK’s exceptionally strong science base, taking forward the underpinning research supported by EPSRC to fill the gap between proven concepts and full commercialisation.

Industry/academic collaboration:

BP has invested $100 million in the BP International Centre for Advanced Materials (BP-ICAM). Based at three UK universities and one in the US, BP-ICAM aims to bring together exciting major challenges in industry with great minds in academia. EPSRC’s long-term support of advanced materials in the UK has provided much of the academic capability that BP are now able to tap into. Core objectives include the development of better structural materials, smarter coatings and a new generation of industrial membranes. Dr Robert Sorrell, Associate Director of the BP International Centre for Advanced Materials (BP-ICAM) says: “By investing in advanced materials research, we support the underpinning technologies that have applications across all our business activities.”

Spin out success

•With a major manufacturing plant in the UK, ApaTech, a company formed to commercialise EPSRC-funded research at Queen Mary, University of London, is a world leader in synthetic bone material. It was sold to US giant Baxter for $330 million in 2010.

•Research into renewable polymers by EPSRC-funded chemists at Imperial College London led to the foundation of a spin-out company, Plaxica, to commercialise the scientists’ research into eco-friendly next-generation bioplastics. The company now employs 26 full-time staff. It has been supported throughout by the Technology Strategy Board, which has invested £700,000 over four years.

MATERIALS FORA SMARTER FUTURE

Advanced materials research has been identified by the UK Government as one of the Great Technologies that will propel the UK to future growth as part of the UK’s high tech industrial strategy.Defined as completely new materials such as super-strong, super-conductive graphene, or developments of traditional materials such as lightweight alloys, advanced materials are essential to 21st century manufacturing in a UK market worth £197 billion per annum and representing 15 per cent of GDP.

The UK has a long-established reputation for research excellence in materials science with particular strengths in its ability to bring together different disciplines across maths, physics, chemistry and engineering to tackle real world problems. This excellence in research is coupled with a strong track record in exploiting materials innovations by industry and business underpinning the economy.

As the UK’s largest sponsor of research and training in engineering and physical sciences, EPSRC is investing £385 million in advanced materials research to firmly embed the UK’s position as a world leader in this field. Materials science has a close relationship to new technologies such as nanotechnology. Fundamental and applied studies of materials at the nano scale have led to new nanomaterials with ground-breaking properties which have the potential to realise many new engineering applications. Spanning the manufacturing and engineering portfolio, advanced materials supports everything from new types of food packaging to self-healing aircraft materials, fibre optics for telecommunications to ceramic body armour.

EPSRC’s advanced materials investments include support for 23 research institutions in the UK, many of which are internationally recognised as centres of excellence in advanced materials.

Maximising potential

•Reducing lead times and accelerating translation

Encouraging the acceleration of the commercialisation of advanced materials and strong academic-industrial collaboration from early stage research, including collaboration with the Technology Strategy Board, particularly through the High Value Manufacturing Catapult.

•Sustainability

Developing new energy efficient/generating technologies, and enabling industrial sectors to reduce costs and reliance on scarce or prohibited materials. Applications include next-generation LEDs.

•Development of new materials

Creating new market opportunities and scaling up of novel materials with improved structural or functional properties. We now have the ability to design new materials that fulfil unmet needs in the areas of telecommunications, electronics, pharmaceuticals, automotive and aerospace.

£385m EPSRC investment in advanced materials research

323 additional PhD students supported in advanced materials

£197 billion annual turnover for UK businesses that produce and process materials1

15 per cent of UK GDP2 derives from advanced materials

£53 billion the export value1 of UK advanced materials 1 Annual Business Survey, 2010, Revised Results,

Released on 14 June 2012, Office of National Statistics - SIC codes used: 13, 15-17, 19-20, 22-25, 38

2 A Strategy for Materials, DTI, Materials Innovation and Growth Team, 2006 http://www.matuk.co.uk/docs/DTI_mat_bro.pdf

3 http://www.ukadvancedengineering.com/marketing/advanced-materials/ accessed 03 April 2012

4 Materials for Key Enabling Technologies, European Science Foundation, June 2011

“Having great ideas doesn’t involve excessive time. But what does take time is working them through. That’s what EPSRC funding allowed me to do. It put a rocket under the metamaterials work.”Professor Sir John Pendry