Durham University and regional partners will take part in four North East innovation programmes sharing £23.7 million from the Local Innovation Partnerships Fund, with the work spanning future technologies, sustainable chemicals, advanced materials and lower carbon construction products.
CRAFT, NE CAGE, NOVA and Project Sycamore are expected to attract a further £55 million of private investment while giving companies access to research expertise, specialist equipment and manufacturing development capability. The four programmes cover different stages of industrial development, from turning emerging research into engineered systems to proving whether new materials can be produced consistently at larger volumes.
Durham will lead CRAFT, the Centre for Realisation and Advancement of Future Technologies, from NETPark near Sedgefield, where research in fields including space and fusion will be developed towards commercial application. Laboratory systems can depend on materials, tolerances or operating conditions that become difficult to reproduce as volume rises, requiring substantial engineering work before a scientific result becomes a manufacturable product.
Shared facilities allow companies to test processes and prototypes without buying every piece of specialist equipment before a technology has reached commercial scale. Process trials can expose problems in material handling, thermal control, repeatability or equipment design while changes remain cheaper to make than they would be after a production line has been installed.
NE CAGE, the North East Centre for Accelerating the Green Economy, brings Procter & Gamble together with Durham and other regional partners around sustainable chemicals and materials. Its planned capability includes enzyme discovery, bioimaging, omics and advanced testing, allowing alternative materials and processes to be assessed under conditions closer to those encountered in manufacture.
Replacing a conventional chemical process with a biological route can alter viscosity, stability, reaction speed, shelf life or compatibility with existing equipment, while a lower carbon material may introduce different mechanical or thermal behaviour elsewhere in the product. Testing has to identify those changes before a new formulation moves into production, otherwise an environmental improvement in one part of the process can create additional losses in another.
CPI will lead NOVA, the North East Vision for High Value Materials Innovation Acceleration, with two Catapults, four universities and regional businesses contributing to work in semiconductors, batteries and other advanced materials. Durham’s GJ Russell Electron Microscopy facility will provide analysis capable of revealing defects, interfaces and particle structures at scales that influence electrical, thermal and mechanical performance.
Material behaviour can change during scale up because mixing, heating, deposition and cooling conditions become harder to control uniformly as batch size grows. Comparing microscopic structure with the process used to create it can show whether a defect originated in the material chemistry or in the manufacturing route, allowing engineers to correct the appropriate stage before larger volumes are committed.
Battery materials provide one example, since particle structure and interfaces can affect ion transport and degradation, while semiconductor materials can be undermined by defects too small to identify through routine visual inspection. Discovering those problems during pilot manufacture is considerably less costly than finding them after equipment has been configured for sustained production.
NOVA is intended to take projects from feasibility into larger scale development, which places emphasis on production consistency as well as material performance. Parameters that can be adjusted manually in a laboratory become harder to maintain across larger equipment, while material flow, heat transfer and mixing behaviour can change as vessels, coating widths or production rates increase.
Project Sycamore concentrates on a defined construction materials route, with Durham spin-out Low Carbon Materials developing carbon negative additives for concrete and asphalt. Any additive entering existing batching and paving systems has to disperse consistently, interact predictably with other constituents and preserve the mechanical properties required by the finished product.
Products that fit established manufacturing equipment face a lower adoption barrier than materials requiring customers to redesign plants or working practices, so the development work has to cover process compatibility as well as carbon performance. Scaling production also requires consistent raw material, quality control and sufficient output to supply construction projects without large batch variation.
The four programmes sit within the UK Government’s £500 million Local Innovation Partnerships Fund and build on research and industrial capability already present across the North East. Regional partners expect the work to support hundreds of high value jobs and around 90 products reaching market, although those outcomes depend on companies progressing beyond research into qualification and commercial production.
The anticipated £55 million of private investment will provide an additional measure of that progress, since companies will only continue committing capital where technical performance, manufacturing cost and market demand support further development. Publicly funded equipment can reduce the cost of early trials, but repeatable production still has to be demonstrated before a technology can support a viable industrial business.
Materials developed through NOVA could feed into batteries, semiconductors or energy systems, while NE CAGE addresses chemical and biological processes, CRAFT works on emerging technologies and Sycamore concentrates on construction materials. Their value will be established as projects move through pilot production, qualification and manufacturing, where the constraints of equipment, materials and process control become harder to avoid than they are in the laboratory.
