CompletedMaterials & ManufacturingEngineering

Sir Henry Royce InsStitute - recurrent grant

FunderEPSRC(part of UKRI)
Recipient organisationUniversity of Manchester
Funding£52.3M
PeriodMar 2016 — Mar 2023

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

The Sir Henry Royce Institute for Advanced Materials is stitching together the UK’s fragmented materials innovation chain — from lab discovery to factory floor — under one national roof. The problem is that promising new materials often stall between invention and application. A university might create a novel polymer or alloy, but no single organisation has the facilities, expertise, or funding to test it at scale, refine its manufacturing, and push it into products. This gap costs time and money, and leaves breakthroughs sitting on shelves. The Institute aims to close that loop by providing shared, state-of-the-art equipment and a coordinated research strategy across nine core material areas — from biomedical devices to nuclear materials to energy storage. If it succeeds, the UK could develop and deploy advanced materials faster and more cheaply than it does now. That would affect things people rarely think about: lighter aircraft parts, longer-lasting batteries, more efficient computer chips, and safer nuclear reactors. The work is applied and strategic, not fundamental science — it is designed to accelerate translation, not to explore basic questions. The payoff is economic competitiveness and industrial resilience, delivered through materials that quietly underpin modern life.

View original technical description
As a national institute, The Sir Henry Royce Institute (SHRI) for Advanced Materials, will provide the missing 'link' in the UK innovation chain allowing the iterative design of advanced materials for various applications, at speed and reasonable cost, providing a critical component to delivering on the government's economic strategy. The Institute will reduce the time-scales to translate discoveries to applications, provide strategic leadership together with training and career development in areas of particular need. The aim is to establish the Sir Henry Royce Institute for Advanced Materials as an 'An international flagship for the accelerated discovery and development of new materials systems for the economic and societal benefit of the UK.'. The SHRI will cover the invention and manufacture of Soft Materials; Functional Materials; Structural Engineering Materials and Energy Materials along with the necessary facilities to test and characterise them within a framework that emphasises the sustainable use of materials. Initially there will be 9 core material areas led by founding partners: - Chemical materials discovery - Biomedical materials and devices - Materials for energy efficient ICT - Atoms to devices - 2D Materials systems - Advanced Metals Processing - Materials systems for demanding environments - Energy Storage - Nuclear materials

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Andrew Cooper (Co-Investigator)Edmund Harold Linfield (Co-Investigator)Martin O'Brien (Co-Investigator)Neil Alford (Co-Investigator)P Bruce (Co-Investigator)Philip Withers (Principal Investigator)Richard Friend (Co-Investigator)W Rainforth (Co-Investigator)

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Original classification

Research Grant

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.