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From developing greener materials and processes to growing more sustainable supply chains, a new £13.6 million research hub, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), will help researchers at the University of Warwick tackle some of the UK’s biggest manufacturing challenges.

Dr Hannes Houck (Chemistry) has been awarded €1.5 million starting grants by the European Research Council (ERC). This funding, part of a €761 million initiative, empowers visionary talents to establish independent teams and pursue groundbreaking research across Europe.

As part of the drive toward sustainable manufacturing, Dr. Houck has proposed a concept to transform 3D photo-printed wasted into a reusable ink for re-printing. The project, titled "DeCoDER: Decoupled Covalent Dynamic Exchange Reactions for Closed-Loop Photo-3D-printing", introduces a novel chemical framework designed to enable full recyclability of 3D printed materials—without the need for additional chemical processes.

Dr Hannes Houck explains,

"Light-based 3D printing is rapidly transforming from niche applications to more industrially relevant manufacturing of the next-generation of synthetic materials, including dental retainers, footwear and 3D printed car parts. But with this fast-growing production also comes severe concerns and environmental challenges about the large amounts of non-recyclable waste that is generated from 3D photo-printing. The current working principle of light-based 3D printing inks is based on photochemical processes that permanently harden a liquid into a solid - so-called covalently crosslinked - 3D object. This makes the ink single-use and the resulting printed materials unrecyclable. This project has the ambition to address this issue by re-designing the chemistry so that one and the same ink can be re-used for multiple re-prints, making it a closed-loop process."

Dr Hannes Houck said,

“It is a great honour to receive this prestigious ERC grant and I am very much looking forward to the enormous boost that this gives to our Photochemistry for Materials research team. With the DeCoDER project, we want to make impactful contributions and overcome fundamental challenges to the chemistry that drives light-based additive manufacturing."

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