centre themes
manufacturing solutions

• Exploiting process consolidation through the co-creation of products with EI features, e.g. antennae or electrical interconnect, by means of additive manufacturing and assembly of electronics and sensors to embody light-weight, high performance EI into products, processes and operational environments;
• Enabling cradle-to-cradle approaches for remanufacturing, recycling and re-use, by means of intelligent processes interrogating products at their end of life, identifying through-life history and BOM;
• Developing novel manufacturing solutions that add multifunctionalities and/or enhance operational capability by novel processing of substrates; Mechanobiological solutions (e.g. markers for osteoblastogenesis) and at different scales (e.g. cellular or scaffold macrostructure level).
• EI in processes to develop Industry 4.0 features, allowing communications between processes and products during production, providing opportunities for closed-loop optimisation of processes to products and vice versa.

exemplar of PhD Projects with a focus in the area included:

• Adam Kaye co-sponsored by Printed Electronics "Ink-Jet Printing Antennas on 3D Curved Surfaces"
• Athanasis Pouchias co-sponored by TWI "RTM Process Monitoring and Predictive Analysis"
• Joe Holt co-sponsored by Far-UK "Design and Manufacture of Functionally-tailored Multimaterial Structures with Embedded Intelligence"
• Peter D'Ath co-sponsored by Innospec "Optimisation Studies for Acid Chloride Synthesis and Scale-up"