Lancaster University is consistently ranked in the UK Top 10 (the only such NW university), and in the top 1% of universities worldwide. Lancaster plays a key role in the N8 Northern university partnership and the annual Higher Education Business and Community Interaction Survey places Lancaster in the UK top 10 for the number and value of its SME partnerships. To ensure the highest quality research Lancaster has made targeted investments of over £450m since 2004, with a further £135m planned for the next three years. Targeted and strategic investment is employed to expand in new areas and to improve performance in our current subject strengths. Areas of strength at Lancaster include: research in advanced functional materials; ultra-isolated environments; nuclear materials research; and development and the security of large-scale complex cyber-physical environments, and these four areas make up the themes of the experiment bundles in this application. Following a very strong performance in RAE 2008, we anticipate a strong outcome in the 2014 exercise to reinforce our position among the UK's very best research-led universities. The experimental equipment highlighted herein will support, refresh and update facilities in these areas. Existing academics in these fields have solid international reputations, and we are also recruiting 50 rising stars in celebration of our 50th anniversary, whose appointment will be strategically aligned to support and develop our very best research. Lancaster has a strong international presence through strategic international university and industrial partnerships. We collaborate globally on key research issues with international impact. Nationally, Lancaster is a leading research-intensive university. As a key partner in the N8 consortium, Lancaster contributes to the N8 database of assets and follows guidelines set out in the N8 Equipment Sharing Toolkit (N8 EST) to facilitate sharing of equipment between members. New state-of-the-art facilities in these key areas will lead to new research collaborations and opportunities - both at a national and international level and help to bring in talented collaborators not only to the UK but to the Northern region. Demand assessment studies conducted externally on behalf of Lancaster show significant industrial demand for the use of these facilities for their own research and development activities as well as research and innovation projects with the university. Lancaster University has an excellent track record of engaging with SMEs, and since 1998 it has delivered over 50 projects, part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund, totaling over £72m, enabling the university to work with over 5000 companies to date. An essential element of our sustainability model is the promotion of industrial access to our facilities and resources. The university already has in place access arrangements for industry in key facilities (InfoLab21, Lancaster Environment Centre and Engineering), with over 100 company staff currently co-located in facilities in our departments. The new Collaborative Technology Access Programme (cTAP) at Lancaster will develop a business model to provide managed industry access to an increasingly wide range of technologies on the campus, including the facilities highlighted within this proposal. We are developing a single entry route to our facilities, supported by a business-facing group of technical staff and believe we will be the first university to offer this service.

Thin films with a high technical specification are used in many everyday devices, including displays, solar cells, electronic devices, batteries, and sensors. Printing of the high-value flexible electronic films with insulating, dielectric, semiconducting and conducting materials used in these devices makes a major and rapidly growing contribution to UK industry.The thickness of the films required, the starting materials used and the final high-value functions desired in the finished product vary significantly. However, the scientific principles that govern the behaviour of the printing processes for these diverse applications have many similarities, because they are all formed by selectively spreading a wet film of suspended solid particles and drying it. At present the optimisation of the printing parameters for these films is commonly achieved through a trial and error process rather than systematic intelligent control. Individual processes are being optimised in isolation without cross-fertilization of knowledge. In a fast changing world, where disruption to supply chains or development of improved materials can change the process input materials, the need to reconfigure the formulations/printing parameters used increases. Furthermore, desired outputs can also change rapidly as the manufacturers and customers seek to meet changing demands of their market for example requiring more precise control of film parameters such as thickness and electrical properties. Adjusting to such continually moving goal posts by relying on trial and error testing is time-consuming, wasteful and costly. The responsive manufacturing technology we propose to develop will have sufficient flexibility to overcome such problems by utilizing intelligent machine learning to control the printing parameters in real-time and therefore maintain an optimized printing process robustly in the face of variations in feedstock materials and/or the required output. It is surprising that there has been no major attempt to implement this approach to process control and optimisation for solution printed materials. This is despite process monitoring and feedback-based optimisation being proven enabling methods in other sectors such as additive manufacturing. This will be achieved by developing control algorithms for the printing process that take into account our theoretical understanding of the processes occurring and utilizing high-speed (minimized and proxy) in situ data acquisition to respond autonomously and continuously to perturbations in the feedstock materials or required film properties. We will make use of the wide range of laboratory scale processing systems our project team regularly use for the production of model colloidal films, ceramic dielectrics, photovoltaics and battery electrodes to provide the datasets required to educate the machine learning algorithms, test our theoretical understanding, develop models of the printing processes and to ultimately test the autonomous control system that we develop. Having proven the system works at a laboratory scale we plan to perform a series of demonstration runs at industrial scale in collaboration with project partners CPI who are world leading experts in production of printed electronics. This will provide the evidence needed to prove that this approach can work at an industrial scale in a highly demanding production environment (printed electronics require a high degree of control of the surface chemistry between subsequent layers to perform correctly and are typically made in cleanroom/glove-boxes within strict environmental tolerances). We envisage a future where a deep theoretical understanding of the processes that are taking place is utilised by artificial intelligence to continuously control and optimise the manufacture of 21st century high-value printed films autonomously using the minimum number of high-speed measurements to achieve the desired results.

The project aims to create a new Hub that will act as a national gateway for Advanced Metrology, engaging with UK industry to co-create and co-deliver frontier and innovative research and technologies, and with policy makers and scientific leaders, to drive future UK manufacturing excellence with a clear emphasis on sustainability. The Hub will have environmental and economic sustainability embedded throughout its programme, both in terms of prioritising industry challenges that the research will address, and within the operational delivery. One of the largest challenges in improving sustainability in manufacturing is the availability of the actionable information that is essential to both improve existing processes to reduce waste, and to enable new processes and methods that significantly enhance resource efficiency through reduced energy usage, material reuse and recycling, and reduced transportation (as a result of supply-chain efficiency). By delivering a future where pervasive metrology systems sense, monitor and control manufacturing systems to self-optimise, we will realise the connected and autonomous systems critical for achieving net zero. Delivering these advances requires the development of manufacturing systems that cannot be realised without a new integrated paradigm in metrology, embracing ultra-fast and compact sensors, distributed artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, and autonomous prognostics control systems far beyond the current state-of-the-art. Hence, the Hub's research programme will be structured around three underpinning research themes to address three Key Research Objectives: Create and apply new sensor technologies incorporating nanophotonics/quantum sensing principles combined with photonic edge computing to realise high-precision ultra-fast, ultra-compact, and low-cost sensors/instruments within smart manufacturing processes and systems. Create and apply new resilient and interpretable metrology aimed at capturing actionable information for sustainable manufacturing. Unify whole system autonomous control for sustainability in manufacturing machinery systems, which optimises process, energy use and resource efficiency in complex systems at the design state and through life. When combined, these objectives will deliver universal 'measurement/analysis/control' solutions for early adoption to address sustainable manufacturing challenges. Five priority areas have been identified to demonstrate new metrology technologies and methods; sustainable and connected machinery, zero carbon transport, clean energy systems, semiconductors, and manufacturing reuse. The programme will develop and demonstrate new metrology technologies and methods with clear applications in these sectors. This will be achieved working closely with metrology equipment/software/service providers, manufacturing systems providers, and with manufacturing end-users, supported closely by partners across the UK Catapult network and national and international standardisation bodies. The Hub comprises a substantial consortium, led by the Centre for Precision Technologies at Huddersfield. Initial research spokes will be based at Heriot-Watt, Oxford, Queens (Belfast) and Southampton universities, with Innovation Spokes at The Manufacturing Technologies Centre (MTC) and the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC), and a hybrid Research/Innovation Spoke at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL). Over 25 industrial partners were involved in co-creating the Hub and will be working with the research team to support, delivery and accelerate commercialisation of research outcomes via sponsored research projects, knowledge exchange, technology transfer (IP licensing and spin-out), and training/skills development.

Ultrasonics, the science and technology of sound at frequencies above the audible range, has a huge range of applications in sensing and remote delivery of energy. In sensing, 20% of medical scans rely on ultrasonics for increasingly diverse procedures. Ultrasonics is pervasive in underwater sensing and communication and a key technology for non-destructive evaluation. Ultrasonic devices are essential components in every mobile phone and are being developed for enhanced biometric security. Ultrasound is also important in remote delivery of energy. In medical therapy, it is used to treat neural dysfunction and cancer. Many surgical tools are actuated with ultrasound. As the best way to clean surfaces and bond interconnects, ultrasound is pervasive in semiconductor and electronics fabrication; it is also being explored for power delivery to implants and to give a contactless sense of touch. Such a broad range of applications predicts an exciting future: new materials will emerge into applications; semiconductor circuits will deliver smaller, more convenient instrumentation systems; autonomy and robotics will call for better sensors; and data analysis will benefit from machine learning. To maintain competitive advantage in this dynamic and multidisciplinary topic, companies worldwide rely on ambitious, innovative engineers to provide their unique knowledge of ultrasonics. As a significant contribution to address this need, Medical & Industrial Ultrasonics at the University of Glasgow and the Centre for Ultrasonic Engineering at the University of Strathclyde will combine to form the Centre for Doctoral Training in Future Ultrasonic Engineering (FUSE), the largest academic ultrasonic engineering unit in the world. Working with more than 30 external organisations, from microcompanies to multinationals, this will, for the first time, enable systematic training of a new generation of leaders in ultrasonics research, engineering and product development. This training will take place in the world-class research environment provided by two of the UK's pre-eminent universities with its partners, creating a training and research powerhouse in ultrasonics that will attract the best students and put them at the global forefront of the field.