The Bristol Centre for Functional Nanomaterials (BCFN) is an EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training at the forefront of creative graduate training, equipping students to meet global grand challenges. The BCFN focus is to produce the highest quality students capable of designing, measuring and understanding advanced functional materials from their fundamental components, to their real-world applications. This is achieved by breaking down the traditional boundaries of chemistry, physics, biology and engineering, and providing training in a highly creative, adaptive and flexible way. Functional materials, and their characterisation, are vital to the UK economy, and are found in a very diverse range of application sectors including medicine, energy, food and coatings, in a wide range of high value products and are key to fundamental aspects of science. Understanding materials across all length scales and application areas is pivotal to our success - there is therefore a clear need for highly-skilled graduates, and an understanding of materials across all length scales is pivotal to our success. The global market for advanced materials is predicted to be $957bn by 2015, and we are committed to providing cohorts of skilled scientists who can lead innovation in both academia and industry. Our approach is to embed the training program into every aspect of the student experience. This means that the students receive the strongest possible scientific foundations through taught courses and research projects but also develop a fully rounded set of skills, including communication, team working, entrepreneurship and creativity. We have a proven track record of excellence in graduate training and have pioneered innovative tools where the needs of the student are at the core. These have included new online learning tools, a mixture of short- and long-term research projects to promote choice and a wider research experience, and intense involvement with industry which allows students to be exposed to "realworld" problems, ensuring that their creativity is always directed towards finding solutions. We have an extensive expert network of supervisors who deliver the training, whilst collaborating to create new research areas. Our network has more than 100 academics from 15 departments across four faculties at the University of Bristol, aswell as industrial partners. This ensures that the BCFN research and training can adapt to the changing needs of both the UK and global demands for materials. Our centre is located at the nexus of funding council priority areas, and has studentship support (3 p.a.), staff funding, and dedicated space support from the University. From 2014, we will build on our strong foundations and evolve our training. Our links with industry will be strengthened further and via our Bristol-Industry Graduate Engagement (BRIDGE) program we will build sustainable, long-term research platforms to ensure a true benefit to the economy. We will take our successful training model and create a distance learning platform which can be used by partners overseas and in industry through innovative e-learning. We will run summer schools with these partners to expand the training experience for both BCFN students and partners alike. We will continue our extensive public engagement with schools, the general public and policy makers, ensuring that at all stages we communicate with our stakeholders and receive feedback. We have a strong student-focussed management team to ensure quality and delivery. This team, composed of a Director, Principal, co-Principal, Teaching Fellow, Industrial Research Fellow and Manager, and a wider Operational Team drawn from our core departments of Physics, Chemistry and Biology, represent a wide range of research experience from Fellows of the Royal Society to early career fellows, covering a range of strengths in functional materials with proven leadership and research track records.

Our vision is to use continuous photochemistry and electrochemistry to transform how fine chemicals, agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals are manufactured in the UK. We aim to minimize the amount of chemicals, solvents and processing steps needed to construct complex molecules. We will achieve this by exploiting light and/or electricity to promote more specific chemical transformations and cleaner processes. By linking continuous photochemistry and electro-chemistry with thermal flow chemistry and environmentally acceptable solvents, we will create a toolkit with the power to transform all aspects of chemical synthesis from initial discovery through to chemical manufacturing of high-value molecules. The objective is to increase efficiency in terms of both atoms and energy, resulting in lower cost, low waste, low solvent footprints and shorter manufacturing routes. Historically photo- and electro-chemistry have been under-utilised in academia and industry because they are perceived to be complicated to use, difficult to scale up and engineer into viable processes despite their obvious environmental, energy and cost benefits. We will combine the strategies and the skills needed to overcome these barriers and will open up new areas of science, and deliver a step-change (i) providing routes to novel molecular architectures, hard to reach or even inaccessible by conventional methodologies, (ii) eliminating many toxic reagents by rendering them unnecessary, (iii) minimizing solvent usage, (iv) promoting new methodologies for synthetic route planning. Our proposal is supported by 21 industrial partners covering a broad range of sectors of the chemistry-using industries who are offering £1.23M in-kind support. Therefore, we will study a broad range of reactions to provide a clear understanding of the most effective areas for applying our techniques; we will evaluate strategies for altering the underlying photophysics and kinetics so as to accelerate the efficiency of promising reactions; we will transform our current designs of photochemical and electrochemical reactors, with a combination of engineering, modelling and new fabrication techniques to maximize their efficiency and to provide clear opportunities for scale-up; we will exploit on-line analytics to accelerate the optimisation of continuous photochemical and electrochemical reactions; we will design and build a new generation of reactors for new applications; we will identify the most effective strategies for linking our reactors into integrated multi-step continuous processes with minimized waste; we will demonstrate this integration on at least one synthesis of a representative pharmaceutical target molecule on a larger scale; we will apply a robust series of sustainability metrics to benchmark our approaches against current manufacturing.

Nano-electro-mechanical systems (NEMS) are integrated miniature devices that can sense or actuate on the nanoscale, while generating observable effects on the macroscale. They are beginning to shape into one of the key technologies of the 21st century, which has the potential to revolutionize both industrial and consumer products, transforming the way we live and work through a multitude of applications (ranging from displays, smart phones, portable electronics and computer peripherals to cars, medical diagnostics and therapy, metrology and navigation). However, nanoscopic mechanical motion underpinning the functionality of such systems is often affected by a number of parasitic effects and the chief among them is stiction - unintentional adhesion of moving parts leading to a catastrophic failure of the devices. Correspondingly, the ability to engage and control reliably mechanical movements in NEMS is the main challenge of the technology. We believe that by combining NEMS with liquid crystals we can meet this challenge in a simple yet efficient manner and develop a new generation of NEMS - stiction-free hybrid nano-electro-mechanical systems, which will feature dynamically adjustable behaviour and field-programmable functions. Our approach exploits elastic distortions in liquid crystals coupled to nanoscopic mechanical motion in operating NEMS. By engaging transitions between various structural phases of liquid crystals and their susceptibility to a wide range of stimuli (i.e. heat, light, electric and magnetic fields) we will introduce a mechanism for tuning dynamically the response characteristics of the resulting hybrids and eliminate the need for additional integrated circuitry, thus, reducing the overall complexity and cost of the devices. A broad spectrum of structural transitions exhibited by liquid crystals (when confined at the nanoscale) should further enrich the behavior of such hybrid NEMS as actuators, sensors, relays, re-configurable metamaterials and plasmonic circuits, making the development of adaptive and 'smart' nanosystems a practical proposition.

Smart fabrics, or electronic-textiles (e-textiles), concern the addition of electronic functionality to standard textiles. Textiles are a ubiquitous material available in many forms and used in a huge range of applications from clothing to technical textiles that are applied in, for example, creative industries and medicine. This proposal addresses the fabrication of light emitting films on textiles and their application to achieve textile displays and colour-changing fabrics through research into electronically functional inks and using spray coating, inkjet and screen printing. Textiles are demanding substrates for device printing due to their rough surface topology, porosity and the constraints they impose on processing temperatures. The achievement of suitable functional materials along with reliable, consistent fabrication processes will have a huge impact in the textile, garment and creative industries. The ability to control the appearance of textiles through selective illumination and colour change will produce a step change in e-textile capability that will add value, function and product differentiation. In particular, this programme of research will investigate the fabrication of textile organic light emitting electrochemical cells (OLECs) operating at visible and UV wavelengths. OLECs have the attractions of being electrochemically stable in air, require a low turn on voltage (~3V) and demonstrate a high luminance level (>800 cd/m2) allowing them to be clearly visible in everyday lighting. The OLEC structure requires only a single functional layer which makes it relatively straightforward to fabricate compared to, for example, OLED's. The ability to selectively emit different wavelengths of light will produce a step change in e-textile capability. Visible wavelength OLECs can be used to produce variable, controllable, light emitting patterns on the textile, which can be used in high visibility clothing or fashion applications. UV wavelength OLECs will enable a textile to perform ultraviolet germicidal irradiation (UVGI), which is a disinfection method that uses short wavelength UVC light at 222 or 254 nm. Textile based UVGI can be incorporated into medical applications such as smart bandages to treat/prevent infection and reduce reliance on antibiotics. UV-OLECs can also be combined with additional printed photochromic layers to realise non-light emitting colour changing textiles. When exposed to UV light, photochromic materials change from transparent to opaque and this can produce significant changes in colour. This approach can control the textile appearance without emitting light or requiring the OLEC to be continuously switched on The research will include the formulation of custom designed enhanced organic molecules with enhanced emission efficiency compared to the state of the art. These will be formulated into printable materials and combined with printable conductive materials. Device architectures and fabrication processes (spray coating, inkjet and screen printing) will also be explored. The research will address the key processing challenges in order to realise reliable and robust thin films and devices on textiles.

Soft Matter is ubiquitous, in the form of polymers, colloids, gels, foams, emulsions, pastes, or liquid crystals; of synthetic or biological origin; as bulk materials or as thin films at interfaces. Soft Matter impinges on almost every aspect of human activity: what we eat, what we wear, the cars we drive, the medicines we take, what we use to keep clean and healthy, in sport and leisure. Soft Matter plays a role in many industrial processes including new frontiers such as digital manufacturing, regenerative medicine and personalised products. Soft Matter is complex chemically and physically with structure and properties that depend on length and time scales. Too often the formulation of soft materials has been heuristic, without the fundamental understanding that underpins predictive design, which hampers innovation and leads to problems in scale up and reformulation in response to changing regulation or customer preferences. Durham, Edinburgh and Leeds Universities set up the SOFI CDT in 2014 in response to the challenge from manufacturers across the personal care, coatings, plastics and food sectors to provide future employees with the skills to transform the design and manufacture of soft materials from an art into a science. The dialogue continues with industrial partners, both old and new, which has resulted in this bid for a refreshed CDT in Soft Matter - SOFI2 - that reflects the evolving scientific, technological and industrial landscape. We have a new partnership with the National Formulation Centre, who will lead a training case study and contribute to the wider training programme, and with many new partners from SMEs to multinationals. We will seek to involve more small and medium-sized companies in SOFI2 by providing opportunities for them to engage in training and project supervision. SOFI2 will have increased training in biological soft matter, which has been identified as a growth area by the EPSRC and our partners, and in scale-up and manufacturing, so that our students can understand better the challenges of taking ideas from the laboratory to the customer. Social responsibility in research and innovation will be embedded throughout the training program and we will trial new ideas in participatory research where the public is involved in the creation of research projects. Each cohort of 16 students will spend their first six months on a common training programme in science and engineering, built around case studies co-delivered with industry partners. They then select their PhD projects and join their research groups in Durham, Leeds or Edinburgh. Generic and transferable skills training continues throughout the four years, bringing the cohorts together for both academic-led and student-led activities. We aim to produce SOFI2 graduates who are business-aware and who are good citizens as well as good scientists. The importance of Soft Matter to the UK economy cannot be understated. Industry sectors relying on Soft Matter include paints and coatings; adhesives, sealants and construction products; rubber, plastics and composite materials; pharmaceuticals and healthcare; cosmetics and personal care; household and professional care; agrochemicals; food and beverages; inks and dyes; lubricants and fuel additives; and process chemicals. A 2018 InnovateUK report estimate the formulated products sector (most of which involves Soft Matter) contributed £149 billion annually to the UK economy. The formulated products sector is undergoing a rapid transformation in response to a shift to sustainable feedstocks, environmental and regulatory pressures and personalised products. It will also be shaped in unpredictable ways by data analytics and artificial intelligence. SOFI2 will equip students with the knowledge and skills to thrive in this business environment.