A pilot production line in Swansea is already turning lab-scale solar coatings into commercial products in days rather than years, and this new training centre will supply the engineers needed to scale that work up. The UK has over 4 billion square metres of roofs and facades that could harvest solar energy. The SPECIFIC Innovation and Knowledge Centre aims to use just 20 million square metres of that surface by 2020—less than 0.5 percent of the available area—to generate up to one-third of the UK’s target renewable energy. The centre’s researchers have already produced two potential commercial products and filed eight patents in two years. If the coatings succeed at scale, buildings themselves could become power stations, generating, storing, and releasing energy from their steel and glass surfaces. This would transform the construction and energy sectors, creating new industries and jobs while reducing reliance on centralised power grids. The training centre directly supports this rapid route from lab to production, equipping graduates to lead the emerging functional coatings industry.
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The EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Industrial Functional Coatings: COATED2 will extend and enhance doctoral training provision provided by the current EPSRC CDT COATED. This new CDT will provide 40 EngD research engineers (REs) over 4 cohorts beginning in 2015 to provide critical support to the EPSRC/TSB funded SPECIFIC Innovation and Knowledge Centre (IKC) hosted by Swansea University. The main aim of SPECIFIC is to rapidly develop and up-scale functional coated materials on steel and glass that generate, store and release energy creating buildings as power stations. In the UK more than 4billion m2 of roofs and facades could be used to harvest solar energy. SPECIFIC's vision is to use such surfaces to generate up to one 1/3 of the UK's target renewable energy by the 2020s. This is based on using 20million m2 by 2020, less than 0.5% of the available area. Development of such coatings will lead to an enhancement of value in current manufacturers and the evolution of new industries generating wealth and jobs in the UK. This CDT will furnish these evolving industries with highly skilled graduates whilst providing leaders of industry to existing manufacturers and substrate producers. SPECIFIC supported by COATED REs has made rapid progress and a pilot production line has been established at the IKC opened by Vince Cable MP and Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones in 2012. The input of current REs into the IKC has led to 2 potential commercial products and 8 patents during the first 2 years of operation. The pilot line provides dedicated up-scaling capabilities to take technologies from lab to production in a matter of days or weeks rather than years. As such, these world-class facilities provide a dynamic environment for the development, up scaling and production of innovative functional coated products and the CDT therefore fulfills the EPSRC priority area of complex manufactured products. Not only this but the technical focus of products researched and up-scaled in the CDT will support other priority themes including solar, energy storage, functional materials and sustainable use of materials and thus provides a rapid route through Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs) 1-6 for a number of critical future technologies. The COATED2 programme will continue to provide research and training in the area of functional coatings that will underpin the research and scale-up activities occurring at SPECIFIC. The brief of the CDT will be enhanced to support the new EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing (CIM) in Large Area Electronics of which the Welsh Centre for Printing and Coating (WCPC) at Swansea University is a key partner. The WCPC activities are critical to both SPECIFIC and the CIM as the development of large scale printing process are key for the production of the functional coatings technologies developed at SPECIFIC. Thus, REs will directly support activities that will influence both large-scale EPSRC projects. Further enhancement will come in the form of research aligned with Imperial College London (ICL) as a number of collaborative projects are active with ICL linked to Plastic Electronics and their CDT in this field through SPECIFIC and the WCPC. The strategic working partnership between Swansea and partner universities will be strengthened in 2013 by a £6.6million Welsh Government investment in a Solar Energy Futures Lab bringing leading ICL and Oxford University scientists to the IKC to support the science behind innovation for the full period of the COATED2 CDT. This will provide COATED2 REs with access to these scientists and benefit from the synergy of complementary projects supported through each University/CDT with cross fertilisation through the IKC. This activity of RE support for the IKC and CIM with cluster projects involving partner institutions provides a flourishing and vibrant research environment with world class facilities on hand to facilitate research and success.
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