A coating that can report its own wear and tear—while still on the production line or inside a jet engine—could transform how critical safety products are monitored. Coatings protect everything from turbine blades to medical implants, extending product life and reducing the need for scarce bulk materials. But the UK coatings industry has lagged behind other high-value manufacturing sectors in adopting digital tools. This project aims to close that gap by embedding sensor functions directly into coatings during the deposition process. A multidisciplinary team across five universities will combine modelling, sensing, and deposition techniques to create coatings that self-monitor without external electronics. If successful, the research could give manufacturers real-time data on coating integrity during production and throughout a product’s service life. That would allow predictive maintenance rather than scheduled inspections, reducing downtime and preventing catastrophic failures in sectors like aerospace and energy. The work is exploratory—it will establish whether intelligent coatings can be made reliably at scale—but it lays the groundwork for a digitally enabled, world-leading UK coatings industry.
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Coatings are key to the performance of most manufactured products and they contribute to sustainability by enhancing the efficiency and extending the life of the products that they protect, as well as by enabling the reduced use of scarce bulk materials. Coatings are a vital part of the nation's manufacturing industry, contributing to many sectors, including aerospace, energy, automotive, construction and healthcare. However, until now the UK coatings industry has been lagging behind compared to High Value Manufacturing sectors in terms of design, development, manufacture, and implementation into products, particularly in terms of the degree of digitalisation achieved. This project will develop intelligent coatings with new functionalities that can self-monitor during manufacture and in-service. The multidisciplinary team will use a suite of modelling tools, sensing technologies and experimental deposition and characterisation facilities at The University of Manchester, the University of Sheffield, Cranfield University, Queen's University Belfast and Swansea University to embed new sensor functionalities within coatings, using a variety of deposition processes. This EPSRC Exploratory Stream project will be a key step to address the challenges of digitalisation in the UK coatings manufacturing sector. The proposed research will assist UK PLC to develop manufacturing methods which are predictable, digital-enabled and more productive, providing a pathway to world-leading coating manufacturing processes. The research will support the coatings manufacturing industry to achieve best-in-class levels of High Value Manufacturing.
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