Coatings are key to the performance of most manufactured products and they contribute to sustainability by enhancing the efficiency and extending the life of the products that they protect, as well as by enabling the reduced use of scarce bulk materials. Coatings are a vital part of the nation's manufacturing industry, contributing to many sectors, including aerospace, energy, automotive, construction and healthcare. However, until now the UK coatings industry has been lagging behind compared to High Value Manufacturing sectors in terms of design, development, manufacture, and implementation into products, particularly in terms of the degree of digitalisation achieved. This project will develop intelligent coatings with new functionalities that can self-monitor during manufacture and in-service. The multidisciplinary team will use a suite of modelling tools, sensing technologies and experimental deposition and characterisation facilities at The University of Manchester, the University of Sheffield, Cranfield University, Queen's University Belfast and Swansea University to embed new sensor functionalities within coatings, using a variety of deposition processes. This EPSRC Exploratory Stream project will be a key step to address the challenges of digitalisation in the UK coatings manufacturing sector. The proposed research will assist UK PLC to develop manufacturing methods which are predictable, digital-enabled and more productive, providing a pathway to world-leading coating manufacturing processes. The research will support the coatings manufacturing industry to achieve best-in-class levels of High Value Manufacturing.

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This project enables the development of a simple, rapid, inexpensive and scalable method to fabricate a nano-coated metallic mesh capable of the efficient separation of oil and water emulsions, typically found in the oil and gas industry and resulting from oil extraction techniques. The innovation works on the same principle as fish scales with the combination of relatively large and small holes (micro and nano-sized porosity) which together create a surface that likes water and intensely dislikes oil. This relationship allows water to easily pass through the membrane while leaving the oil behind, separated from the mixture. Current technology either relies on the use of additional chemistry to separate oil and water mixtures, creating secondary effluent streams. Alternatively electrically powered filtration systems are employed which are expensive and energy demanding and rapidly become blocked by the oil content. These pressurised systems often rupture making the current process of separation cumbersome and unproductive and potentially polluting.

Coatings are key to the performance of most products and they contribute to sustainability by enhancing the efficiency and extending the life of the products that they protect, as well as by enabling the reduced use of scarce bulk materials. Therefore, coatings are a vital part of the nation's manufacturing industry, contributing to many sectors, including aerospace, energy, automotive and construction. However, until now the UK coatings industry has been severely lagging behind compared to High Value Manufacturing sectors in terms of all aspects of design, development, manufacture, and implementation into products, particularly in terms of the degree of digitalisation achieved (as epitomised in the "Industry 4.0" concept). This EPSRC NetworkPlus in Digitalised Surface Manufacturing is needed because currently there is no UK University that has all the required interdisciplinary expertise in surface engineering and digital manufacturing and there is a lack of 'connected' knowledge in the area of digitalisation of coating manufacturing processes in UK industry. The Network will bring together academic and industrial expertise in multiple disciplines to address the challenges of digitalising the UK coatings manufacturing sector. The Network will create a community that will be able to carry out innovative leading-edge research which will ultimately allow the coatings manufacturing industry to achieve the best-in-class levels of High Value Manufacturing. The development of a UK-wide network around digital methods for surface manufacturing can bring optimum manufacture processes ("right first time") to the surface engineering and advanced coatings community in the UK. The creation of this NetworkPlus will serve to capture and understand the current manufacturing scene and pump-prime digitalisation activity in this area. The new interdisciplinary research community developed within the Network will assist the UK PLC to develop manufacturing methods which are predictable, digital-enabled and more productive, providing the pathway to class-leading coating manufacturing processes. This will bring resilience and improved productivity across all key UK industrial sectors. End-users of the coatings industry span all sectors and thus the economical and societal impact of the Network will be wide-ranging. In turn, the digitalisation of the coatings manufacturing industry will also mean that the benefits of coatings on products are thoroughly recordable and accessible, as is needed to enable statistically robust knowledge of manufactured product lifetimes and performance. This is vital to enabling full life-cycle assessment of coated products and the sustainability implications of the coatings applied, contributing to the long-term aims of a resilient manufacturing.