Projects to address UK's material dependency
4 Dec 2012
The EPSRC is funding four new projects to address the UK’s limited resources and high material dependency.
The projects could help engineers apply more sustainable materials and processes to their work.
In July 2012 EPSRC brought together academics from a number of disciplines to take part in a collaborative, five-day event known as a ‘sandpit’.
The projects that came out of the event, ‘More with Less: Engineering solutions for resource efficiency’, were awarded just over £5 million in total.
One project entitled ‘Cleaning Land for Wealth’ (CL4W) will look producing perfectly sized and shaped nano sized platinum and arsenic nanoparticles for use in catalytic convertors.
The projects could help engineers apply more sustainable materials and processes to their work.
“The processes we are developing will not only remove poisons such as arsenic and platinum from contaminated land and water courses, we are also confident that we can develop suitable biology and biorefining processes -or biofactories as we are calling them- that can tailor the shapes and sizes of the metallic nanoparticles they will make,” said Prof Kerry Kirwan from Warwick University.
A further project, EXHUME (Efficient X-sector use of HeterogeneoUs MatErials in Manufacturing) will address the task of recycling composite materials.
The project will demonstrate vital re-manufacturing science and process engineering to the waste industry.
It aims to develop the data sets and exemplars of mixed composite processing and resource footprints that can be used to drive the future of scrap re-use across different industrial sectors.
A further two projects will look at recycling municipal waste and how materials can be reused on portable electronic devices.
