The UK’s materials manufacturing sector is building a digital backbone to track, certify, and control materials from factory floor to final product. This matters because the UK cannot reach net-zero without advanced materials—lighter alloys for aircraft, stronger composites for wind turbines, more efficient semiconductors for power grids. But today, manufacturers often cannot monitor material properties in real time during production or through a product’s lifetime. That forces them to treat high-performance materials as generic commodities, wasting energy, increasing waste, and limiting innovation. The centre will develop digital tools—sensors, data platforms, and certification systems—to verify material quality as it is made and used. If successful, manufacturers could guarantee “right-first-time” production, cut waste, extend product life, and unlock new business models based on material performance rather than volume. This is applied research with direct industrial partners. It does not explore fundamental science. Its impact will be felt in factories, supply chains, and infrastructure: cleaner steelmaking, longer-lasting batteries, and more resource-efficient manufacturing across the UK economy.
View original technical description
The Materials Made Smarter Centre has been co-created by Academia and Industry as a response to the pressing need to revolutionise the way we manufacture and value materials in our economy. The UK's ability to manufacture advanced materials underpins our ambitions to move towards cleaner growth and a more resource efficient economy. Innovation towards a net zero-carbon economy needs new materials with enhanced properties, performance and functionality and new processing technologies, with enhanced manufacturing capability, to make and deliver economic and societal benefit to the UK. However, significant technological challenges must still be overcome before we can benefit fully from the transformative technical and environmental benefits that new materials and manufacturing processes may bring. Our capacity to monitor and control material properties both during manufacture and through into service affect our ability to deliver a tailored and guaranteed performance that is 'right-first-time' and limit capacity to manage materials as assets through their lifetime. This reduces materials to the status of a commodity - a status which is both undeserved and unsustainable. Future materials intensive manufacturing needs to add greater value to the materials we use, be that through reduction of environmental impact, extension of product life or via enhanced functionality. Digitalisation of the materials thread will help to enhance their value by developing the tools and means to certify, monitor and control materials in-process and in-service improving productivity and stimulating new business models. Our vision is to put the UK's materials intensive manufacturing industries at the forefront of the UK's technological advancement and green recovery from the dual impacts of COVID and rapid environmental change. We will develop the advanced digital technologies and tools to enable the verification, validation, certification and traceability of materials manufacturing and work with partners to address the challenges of digital adoption. Digitisation of the materials thread will drive productivity improvements in materials intensive industries, realise new business models and change the way we value and use materials.
Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.
Is something wrong? Let us know