Researchers at the University of Bristol are leading a £2.7m ground-breaking project into making new materials which have the ability to self-heal or regenerate.
“The aim of the Manufacturing Immortality consortium is to create new materials which have the ability to regenerate”
The Manufacturing Immortality Project will investigate the development of new materials made up of biological and non-biological parts which are capable of self-healing over the next three years.
- You may like: Bath leads on €5m flexible electronics project
Initially the project will focus on creating materials for use in inaccessible places such as deep-sea cables or radioactive sites, but in the future the research could lead to consumer goods such as mobile phones with self-healing screens.
“This is a hugely exciting project that combines the expertise of researchers across seven universities and 13 companies to deliver truly transformative self-healing technologies for use across a range of application areas,” says Dr Paul Race (pictured left), the Principal Investigator and a Biochemist at the University of Bristol.
“The aim of the Manufacturing Immortality consortium is to create new materials which have the ability to regenerate – or are very difficult to break – by combining bio and non-biological composites, such as bacteria with ceramics, glass and electronics,” he adds.
“This research has the potential to lead to some truly ground-breaking developments which could have a huge impact on our everyday lives – such as smartphone screens which have the ability to ‘self-heal’ if they are cracked or damaged. Our ultimate ambition it that the outcomes of this project will significantly contribute to positioning the UK as a world leader in innovative manufacturing technologies.”
The consortium includes Sheffield Hallam University, University of Manchester, Cranfield University, University of Aberdeen, Lancaster University and Northumbria University, and the project will deliver actual self-healing devices says another researcher.
“This is a substantial and important project and the team hopes that within the next 18 months we will start to see some very exciting results which, by the end of the three-year project, could well be fully functioning devices and materials,” says Dr Paul Bingham, reader in materials engineering at Sheffield Hallam University.
You can seem more from the university at www.bristol.ac.uk.
- You may like: Bristol and Bath’s top tech news of 2017
