The Innovative Manufacturing and Construction Research Centre (IMCRC) will undertake a wide variety of work in the Manufacturing, Construction and product design areas. The work will be contained within 5 programmes:1. Transforming Organisations / Providing individuals, organisations, sectors and regions with the dynamic and innovative capability to thrive in a complex and uncertain future2. High Value Assets / Delivering tools, techniques and designs to maximise the through-life value of high capital cost, long life physical assets3. Healthy & Secure Future / Meeting the growing need for products & environments that promote health, safety and security4. Next Generation Technologies / The future materials, processes, production and information systems to deliver products to the customer5. Customised Products / The design and optimisation techniques to deliver customer specific products.Academics within the Loughborough IMCRC have an internationally leading track record in these areas and a history of strong collaborations to gear IMCRC capabilities with the complementary strengths of external groups.Innovative activities are increasingly distributed across the value chain. The impressive scope of the IMCRC helps us mirror this industrial reality, and enhances knowledge transfer. This advantage of the size and diversity of activities within the IMCRC compared with other smaller UK centres gives the Loughborough IMCRC a leading role in this technology and value chain integration area. Loughborough IMCRC as by far the biggest IMRC (in terms of number of academics, researchers and in funding) can take a more holistic approach and has the skills to generate, identify and integrate expertise from elsewhere as required. Therefore, a large proportion of the Centre funding (approximately 50%) will be allocated to Integration projects or Grand Challenges that cover a spectrum of expertise.The Centre covers a wide range of activities from Concept to Creation.The activities of the Centre will take place in collaboration with the world's best researchers in the UK and abroad. The academics within the Centre will be organised into 3 Research Units so that they can be co-ordinated effectively and can cooperate on Programmes.

Funds are requested to support a post graduate student, Dennis Shay to carry out his Ph.D. based at Engineering Materials at the University of Sheffield in collaboration with the Materials Research Institute at Pennsylvania State University. The project concerns the fabrication and characterisation of novel high Tc perovskite structured piezoelectrics intended to replace Pb(Zr,Ti)O3 in high strain and temperature actuator and bi-morph applications. The compositions are based on the pseudoternary solid solution, BiMg1/2Ti1/2O3 / BiFeO3 / PbTiO3.

The traditional view of the ordering of polarisation or magnetisation in both ferroelectrics and ferromagnets is that local dipoles or magnetic moments are arranged into neat rows and columns, and that boundaries between neatly arranged groups must strictly conform to the crystallography of the host material (conventional stripe domains). However, recent experimental research in three-dimensionally size-constrained soft ferromagnets has revealed the existence of completely different domain states which form into vortices. As with many aspects of behaviour in ferromagnetism, analogous properties in the behaviour of the electrical polarisation in ferroelectrics is often seen, and recent modelling strongly suggests that such vortex domain states should also exist in ferroelectrics. Differences in the energetics between ferromagnets and ferroelectrics means that such unusual behaviour is only expected to dominate whenever ferroelectric dimensions are reduced to the order of ~10 nm. The creation of such small structures and the characterisation of their domain states represents a serious challenge to experimentalists involved in ferroelectric research and yet the potential for new discovery is immense. Further, simple vortex structures may only be the tip of the ice-berg, as much more exotic domain patterns have been postulated: for example some theorists have suggested the possibility of an electrostatic solenoid-analogue. Given the research performed to date, and the postulations made by theorists, the creation of three-dimensionally constrained nanostructures in ferroelectrics, and the subsequent analysis of their domain characteristics, clearly represents an exciting and challenging problem. This project will address this area of research by combining expertise in nanoscale ferroelectric fabrication with specialist characterisation techniques such as electron holography, second-harmonic near field optics, nano-Raman spectroscopy and scanning probe microscopy. The programme builds on an already established successful collaboration between ferroelectric activities in Queen's University Belfast and Cambridge, and this is augmented by international experts in specifically chosen characterisation techniques.

This proposal aims to investigate a range of perovskite structured thin films using a combination of Raman spectroscopy, in-situ transmission electron microscopy and synchrotron X-radiation in order to determine how constraint controls the onset and temperature dependence of octahedral tilt transitions in thin films and ensuing domain structure. It is anticpated that this will give a greater understanding of how constraint influences functional properties in ferroelectric and dielectric thin layers. The proposal will concentrate on three key systems in which tilt transitions are known to influence macroscopic properties; PbZrxTi(1-x)O3, Ag(Nb,Ta)O3 and the newly discovered (1-x)BiMeO3-xPbTiO3 solid solutions. The proposal is joint between University of Sheffield, Pennsylvania State University and Argonne National Laboratory. The latter will submit an independent National Science Foundation proposal which directly compliments the work proposed here. The programme is for 4 years at the request of the National Science Foundation, USA.

This project will develop experimental and computational procedures for understanding the structure of nanoporous polymers (NPs) for use in applications that exploit their surface chemistry (e.g., gas storage, molecular separations, sensors and catalysis) and hence it will generate a sufficient knowledge base to develop polymer-based porous materials with controlled properties at the nano and macroscopic scales. The work will integrate the interrelated, but distinct, areas of expertise of two research groups from the United States (Colina and Runt, Penn State University) and three research groups from the United Kingdom (Budd and Siperstein, University of Manchester; McKeown, Cardiff University) to train graduate and undergraduate students in modern methods of experimentation, equation-of-state model development and molecular simulation, in a global environment. The proposed research includes (a) synthesis and characterization of NPs, including X-ray characterization of the microporous structure and evolution of the microporous environment when different molecules are adsorbed, and (b) modeling fluid/polymeric properties at molecular and macroscopic scales, to understand their structure, morphology, and properties. The intellectual merit of this proposal is its novel approach for the design of functional porous materials, guiding the synthesis of monomers and polymers by appropriate structure/property relations obtained from a fundamental understanding of selected experiments to characterize the materials, together with simulations to model their properties. Eventually, this approach should also be applicable to other materials, such as hypercrosslinked polymers or metal coordination polymers, where rigid nanoporosity overlaps with swelling behavior, as currently there is no single approach that can simultaneously describe the surface chemistry, nanoporosity and swelling of such materials.