Engineering news
The launch of the University’s six new research and development centres at the Royal Society was met with cheers and excitement among the audience. The five-year project is the university’s biggest investment yet into research. Apart from scientific results and engineering solutions, the programme is expected to create up to 500 new jobs – directly, in terms of attracting talent into academia, and indirectly, by collaborating with the industry on commercial solutions, which in turn should generate new jobs in local companies.
Each of the six beacons will address a specific global challenge – from creating new propulsion systems for green electric vehicles, to securing sustainable food supplies that can withstand climate change, to developing smart industrial systems and personalised therapies, to fighting modern slavery. These challenges are part of the 17 of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals – the objectives to protect the planet, end poverty, and ensure prosperity for all.
Professor Dame Jessica Corner, pro-vice-chancellor for research and knowledge at the university, said that – in one way or another – engineering was present in nearly each of the six areas. The project “is going to build capacity, it’s going to build facilities, and the discoveries that will come out of it will link back to engineering disciplines – that will be very important for profiling engineering,” she told PE. Diversity and attracting more women into engineering are also high on the agenda, she added.
The Smart Industrial Systems Beacon, under the leadership of Steve Benford, professor of Collaborative Computing in the Mixed Reality Laboratory at the university, will aim to merge the expertise from industrial technologies, informatics, creative design and social sciences. The plan is to build smart production processes and connected industrial infrastructure for smart factories of the future.
“Industrial economy was about making physical products. Digital economy is about delivering online services. A future economy is going to see a collision of those things,” he said at the event. “It’s going to be about personalised experiences that will draw on your data and adapt to who you are.” The result will be more meaningful and the production process more sustainable, he added. “And future factories will also draw on mass products that will configure themselves just in time.”
Meanwhile, our progress with new materials and technologies will help us build future green and sustainable transport, said professor David Grant, who heads the Advanced Materials Research Group at the university. “Propulsion is the heartbeat of modern society,” he said. “We know that fossil fuels are running out but 40,000 people last year died of respiratory disease related to peat pollution in the UK alone. 20% of greenhouse gas emissions is from transport,” he said. Same is true for land, he added, and with ever-soaring population fossil fuels just “isn’t going to cut it. We need a step change: and the step change is more electric transport.”
His Beacon hopes to achieve just that: Develop new materials, new systems, and new designs to make propulsion systems more efficient – anything from energy storage to electrical generation, transmissions, and drive trains. “The efficiency is key,” Grant told PE.
Of course, on its own Nottingham University is unlikely to solve these challenges, and that’s why collaboration is crucial, said Corner. “We’d like to think that we’ll have a demonstration of an electric aeroplane within five years, but that will be an enormous challenge,” she told PE. “It’s long term, really, but all sorts of benefits will emerge from new collaborations, from the new early career researchers, and so on.”
The six Beacons of Excellence that the university is investing in are:
Rights Lab — finding solutions to ending modern-day slavery
Green Chemicals — the next global industrial revolution
Precision Imaging — personalised therapies to transform lives
Propulsion Futures — the future of propulsion
Smart Industrial Systems — sustainable products for the future
Future Food — exploring new ways of feeding the world