April saw our fifth Industry Study Group. Study Groups with industry have been running for over fifty years and, having started with pioneering work in the UK in the 1960s, these groups now take place all over the world. They have been hugely successful in solving problems and providing insight for a variety of organisations.

Building on our previous successful events we welcomed a multidisciplinary research audience of HetSys staff and PhD students plus industry partners AWE, Johnson Matthey and Syngenta. These three companies presented their challenges to our students and academics, who broke into groups working together and sharing their skills over the next three days to code, model, and sketch solutions to the problems.

Alan Collier, Syngenta’s Principal Process Engineer commented that “it can be hard to find a block of time to spend on a single problem and that working with an enthusiastic team with diverse skills ensured that lots of progress was made on a challenging topic. The team coped admirably with a problem that was quite loosely defined and with little real data to analyse”. Syngenta Group is a leading agricultural innovation and technology company looking to create long-term sustainable value for farmers. Their challenge required students to use their modelling skills to explore ways to reduce adhesion of solids during a manufacturing process. Oscar Holroyd, from cohort 3 has found that "the Industry Study Group is an excellent opportunity to enjoy a brief foray into a completely new and exciting area. Working as a group on a novel and challenging problem with a tight schedule always seems to produce more than we expect! On the Syngenta project we managed to blend theoretical work with some scientific computing which will hopefully provide the foundations for more research into a very complex topic".

Science, engineering and technology lie at the heart of AWE’s work manufacturing, maintaining and developing the warheads for Trident, the UK’s ultimate deterrent. Mark Storr presented an exciting and multi-faceted problem looking at optimising workflows to calculate solubility and diffusion parameters for polymeric systems. HetSys team member Livia Bartók-Pártay noted that “the students managed to explore various alternative workflows and suggested innovative solutions to different aspects of the challenge, demonstrating adaptability and creativity in unfamiliar territory. It was great to see them working together so supportively”.

Misbah Sarwar, Rachel Kerber and Carlos Fonte represented Johnson Matthey, a global leader in sustainable technologies bringing their chemistry and engineering backgrounds to the event and asked the group to explore machine learning approaches to modelling chemical reaction networks. Misbah Sarwar, Senior Principal Scientist explained that “the industry day was a great opportunity to explore the use of novel Machine Learning based approaches for studying a range of catalytic systems and processes. We were very impressed by the depth and breadth of the solutions proposed and the student’s ability to think swiftly and solve complex problems efficiently while collaborating and innovating”.

The final day saw the whole group back together to present their findings, successes and challenges. A further meeting to write up the findings was held and would be fed back to AWE, Johnson Matthey and Syngenta.

Thanks to all involved for supporting this event, bringing their expertise, enthusiasm and ideas to the table and demonstrating the power of collaborate working. We hope that several of these challenges will develop into PhD projects for future HetSys cohorts.