Scale Up Mathematics for Formulated Products (SUM4Products)

The formulated product sector influences many aspects of everyday life.  For example, the sector is responsible for producing food and drink, personal-care products, cosmetics, washing and cleaning products, and medicines.  Due to the wide scope of the formulations sector, it contributes a staggering £142bn (GVA) to the UK economy each year.  However, in response to societal changes, there is a growing shift in the sector towards the rapid development of smarter, greener, and more personalised products. This includes:

Developing high-quality, nutritious, and sustainable foods that reduce fat and sugar use without compromising the flavour and texture profiles demanded by consumers.
The rapid formulation of medicines, therapeutics, and foods to provide cost-effective and personalised products to different age/health groups, e.g. creating personalised nutrition for diabetics.
Reformulation of existing products to incorporate new ingredients in response to regulatory changes or shortages, or to avoid degradation due to time in storage.

Unfortunately, the UK formulations sector is ill-prepared to deal with these changes.  Innovation is limited by lengthy and expensive development cycles that rely on experimental trial-and-error.  Moreover, the science behind formulated products is complex and under-developed, and advancements require expertise that spans multiple disciplines.  To make matters worse, there is a lack of knowledge exchange across different application areas, leading to duplicated efforts and unsolved problems.
It is striking that the underlying challenges across different industrial spaces (e.g. food and drink, pharmaceuticals, consumer goods) are very similar from a mathematical perspective. They all require new, predictive models that can link the processing and microstructure of formulated products to their final function and performance.  Multi-scale mathematical methods applied to fluid and solid mechanics, and heat and mass transfer are the ideal foundation to build such models.
Our central aim is to accelerate progress in this key UK sector by creating a long-lasting, multi-disciplinary network with mathematics at the heart that connects academics from multiple disciplines, including engineering, computer science, physics, chemistry, and biology with industrial partners from companies of all sizes, from micro-SMEs to multi-nationals. Mathematics will provide the underlying frameworks for developing predictive modelling capabilities that will unlock innovation across the sector. These models will, for example, open the doors to engineering the taste, feel, and texture of formulated products by varying individual ingredients or processing parameters, with limited need for trial-and-error experiments or even eliminating them altogether. A variety of events to seed collaborations using tried-and-test formats will be organised, and pump priming funding will be made available to develop multi-disciplinary collaborations. A new, community-led network of Innovation Research Fellows will be formed to translate mathematical outputs into impactful deliverables over the lifetime of the NetworkPlus and beyond.