SEE MORE: SECONDARY ELECTRON EMISSION - MICROSCOPY FOR ORGANICS WITH RELIABLE ENGINEERING-PROPERTIES

My vision is to enable reliable large-scale manufacturing of novel advanced organic or hybrid organic/inorganic materials which have complex three-dimensional structure.
An advanced material is one with new properties that allows companies to develop novel high-value products to meet market needs, and in doing so generate growth and high-technology exports. Cutting-edge manufacturing is key to wealth creation in the UK. The UK cannot compete in the low technology (commodity) materials sector: these are now manufactured in countries with low cost labour markets.
To manufacture an advanced material, we have to understand its structure in detail. This means being able to observe and measure it over many length scales (nanometres to millimetres), and then use that information to understand its physical characteristics. Once we have understood how to create a material in the laboratory setting, the next challenge is to scale-up processing capability. Often the manufacturing process itself has a big impact on the microscopic structure of the material, and hence its physical properties. This leads to a development cycle. To maintain desirable properties, process variables are changed, informed by predictive modelling and re-examination of the microscopic structure. The aim is to identify process steps that critically impact on the product output capacity and reliability. This project will work directly with industrial partners to use novel ways of discern microscopic structure so as to inform the product development cycle.
The industrial partners are both large UK firms with interests in the energy sector: one working on developing polymer components for energy storage; the other working on up scaling process technologies for new types of low cost solar cells. For both materials systems, application performance success hinges on complex hierarchical structures. Scientists and engineers have realised that is often not only the material itself, but the way different structural arrangements, each at a different scale, interact with one another. As well as studying materials of immediate commercial application, this project also aims to harvest the information contained in very similar natural materials which also have complex hierarchical structures (spider silk in particular).
Prior development of this class of polymers has been hampered by the absence of measurement instruments and methods capable of accurately observing their composition and complex structure. I aim to refine a new type of electron microscopy that I have developed in order to measure, from the scale of nanometres to millimetres, soft-matter properties that define their electrical and structural performance. This will be tailored to the particular needs of my industrial collaborators, but the technique will also have much wider application. For example, I will also use my method to try to unlock the exact structural mechanisms that are found in the natural material silk - which has extraordinary properties as yet it is not understood how to retain these in the man-made equivalent. With the support of a visiting civil engineering expert who has developed scalable mechanical models for complex hierarchical structures, I aim to build a scalable model that will help to predict the link between process parameter variation and resulting materials properties. This will be informed using my new characterisation method.
Finally, in the light of the results from the research, I hope to pool the knowledge gained from both the industrial and academic partners to formulate a more general understanding of the development cycle for these technologically and economically important class of materials.

Most directly, the project will impact on the people delivering it. It provides the PDRAs and me with the opportunity to experience research cultures in both academia and industry. We will develop an awareness of the different pressures dominating these different environments and the related differences in project planning, management, and communication. It will thus enable all team members to acquire knowledge transfer skills and potentially lead efficient technology/ knowledge transfer between UK academic institutions and UK industry. Staff at both companies will also benefit from new skills and broader knowledge gained during this project. PDRAS and students on the project will learn to communicate their research to the wider public.
The electron microscopy community will gain from the techniques which are to be refined. The methods developed will undoubtedly have much wider applications. New characterisation methods may follow; say by increasing the energy resolution of the secondary spectra, revealing new spectral features and new ways to interpret such measurements. The image contrast mechanisms involved may well open up other forms of material characterisation, leading to further insights into materials processing. Similarly, the theoretical approaches we are taking in order to understand secondary electron spectra from first principles should promote new research into fundamental scattering theory of low energy electrons.
There will be direct, and potentially very large, impact on my industrial collaborators because the project will from a key part of their product development program. I expect that the analysis and understanding of materials and processes provided through this project will lead to faster product development on one hand and products with good reliability on the other, hence leading to direct competitive advantages for these UK companies. These companies already have or are planning to build capacity for large-scale production. Hence, when these new products are introduced to the market and are mass-produced they could impact on the energy sector, transport sector, public health and the environment, all of which will benefit the quality of life the general public.
Of course, once our new approaches to the materials development cycle have been refined, they could also be rolled out into other industrial sectors: these could be centred around any technology that relies on multi-scale, hierarchical soft-matter structures.