On Wednesday 24^th September, WMG was pleased to host a visit from Janice Munday CBE, Director of Advanced Manufacturing and Services at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

Meeting with Lord Bhattacharyya, Ms Munday was keen to hear how WMG develops partnerships with a range of industrial organisations and the significant economic benefits of such partnerships. She was also interested to understand the breadth of research undertaken by WMG, as the leading university centre for advanced manufacturing, towards development of innovation in manufacturing and the work in low carbon mobility delivered through the WMG centre High Value Manufacturing Catapult.

Ms Munday also had the opportunity to take a tour of WMG’s impressive manufacturing R&D facilities including: the Battery Materials Pilot Line and the Vehicle Energy Facility within the Energy Innovation Centre, materials lightweighting projects in the International Manufacturing Centre, and the new polymer processing facilities within the International Institute for Nanocomposites Manufacturing. Ms Munday also had an opportunity to see the site of the National Automotive Innovation Centre, due to open in 2016.

WMG, at the University of Warwick, has announced that it is to create a £4.1m International Institute for Nanocomposites Manufacturing, a first of its kind in the world. The Institute will exploit polymer processing techniques which will enable industry to innovate their manufacturing technologies to produce polymer nanocomposites.

The International Institute for Nanocomposites Manufacturing (IINM) will focus on the manufacture of Nanocomposites by adopting a holistic approach. Through synthesising and functionalising nanoparticles and incorporating such particles into polymers using innovative manufacturing techniques industry will be able to scale up and commercialise products with added functionality.

The new Institute will house state-of-the-art facilities including characterisation laboratories, a wet chemistry laboratory, processing hall, offices and open plan research space. A team of 50 academics and researchers will work collaboratively with other academic groups and industrial partners, both national and international, on fundamental and applied research projects in the field of nanocomposites with application in a broad range of industries, including telecommunications, electronics, pharmaceuticals, aerospace, automotive, security and medicine.

Bank card and other plastic product manufacturers will have access to a powerful new technology that will help the fight against counterfeiting of their products and which can provide an additional security feature for credit cards, thanks to new technology devised by researchers at WMG at the University of Warwick.

The technology will allow manufacturers to rapidly embed individual, unique and hidden individual pieces of data in each item made in large production runs of plastic products or credit cards as they are being created by injection moulding.

The researchers, led by WMG Professor Gordon Smith at the University of Warwick have just applied for patents to protect the new technology which uses the influence of a particular external force that exploits the polarity of particles and fluids, to very selectively influence those particles or a polymer fluid as a product is formed by injection moulding.

WMG is pleased to welcome Professor Peter Halley to visit the department in June. Professor Halley is an internationally-recognised leader in the field of starch-based biopolymers and bio-nanocomposites, based at the University of Queensland in Australia.

Professor Halley will be visiting Professor Tony McNally and WMG’s Nanocomposites research team during his visit and will be giving a seminar, which all Warwick staff and students are invited to attend.

Professor Halley’s seminar, entitled ‘Translational Polymer Research for Sustainable Polymers’, will be taking place on Thursday 13^th June (from 12 noon) in WMG’s International Digital Laboratory.

WMG is very pleased to welcome a number of new academic appointments this month, who will take a leading role in some of our exciting research areas.

Professor Sridhar Seetharaman has joined WMG to take up the Research Chair in Low Carbon Materials Technologies, sponsored by the Royal Academy of Engineering and Tata Steel. Professor Seetharaman joins us from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he was the POSCO Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Co-Director of Center For Iron and Steel Research. Professor Seetharaman will be leading a new programme in the manufacture and application of advanced steels in low carbon technologies and setting up a new team, within WMG's existing Materials and Manufacturing theme, to work with Tata Steel to address the current international priorities of the low carbon agenda.

Professor Tony McNally has joined WMG to lead our developing research in the area of Nanocomposites. Professor McNally joins from Queen's University Belfast, where he was Associate Professor in the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Director of the Polymer Processing Research Centre. The Nanocomposites team, based in WMG's International Institute for Product and Service Innovation, will span WMG's work in Digital Technologies, Materials and Manufacturing.

Dr Claire Dancer has also joined WMG this week to develop WMG's work in Nanocomposites. Dr Dancer joins from the University of Oxford, where she worked as a researcher in the Department of Materials, specifically looking at Manufacturing Methods for Metamaterials.

We also welcome Dr Kwabena Agyaping-Kodua who is joining WMG from the University of Nottingham where he has been Senior Research Fellow in Digital Manufacturing and Systems Engineering at the Precision Manufacturing Centre. As part of WMG's Digital Lifecycle Management team, Dr Agyapong-Kodua will be continuing to develop research activities in the digital manufacturing and systems engineering field, particularly within the remit of high value manufacturing.

WMG at the University of Warwick are to recruit ten new Professors and Associate/Assistant Professors including two new research posts in nanocomposite technologies.

Those new two new nanocomposite researchers will help engineers create new engineering products and materials using nanotechnology -the science of the very small manipulating matter on an atomic and molecular scale – but researching the very small will also create a huge size milestone for WMG as they will in fact be the 499th and 500th persons to be employed in WMG’s research buildings.