Project

The build involved creating unique facilities, purpose-built for innovation exploiting cutting edge technology and world class expertise in materials chemistry and formulation. The project involved complex engineering and building sub-contract work over a sustained period and in several phases, to deliver a state of the art facility.

It required the partial demolition and redevelopment of Liverpool University’s Donnan and Robinson Laboratories Building. The MIF will “create shared central analytical facilities, a new high-throughput formulation laboratory, and maximise usage and leverage for the university’s pre-existing, leading capabilities in molecular biosciences, as well as integrating these with existing research facilities within the Donnan Building. Flexible, specialist workspaces will also permit researchers from other industrial and academic collaborators to use the open-access equipment at the university via a ‘research hotel’ concept.” The limited refurbishment of retained buildings will also be required as part of the project. Areas for refurbishment could include research labs, office accommodation as well as circulation, plant and service spaces.

Background

The University’s Materials Innovation Factory was initially awarded in excess of £1.3 million funding from Research England to develop the Low Carbon Chemistry Lab of the Future to make its research more environmentally sustainable and help address the net zero target. A world-leading materials research facility, the MIF will introduce a range of processes and approaches to reduce its energy usage by an estimated 45% over the next four years and reduce its annual carbon footprint by the equivalent of 415,000kg of CO². The Low Carbon Chemistry Lab of the Future is one of nine projects supported with an £18.9 million investment by Research England, part of UK Research and Innovation, together with the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales and Scottish Funding Council.

The MIF enhances its sophisticated building management systems to enable laboratory teams to proactively monitor their energy usage, introduce smarter control technologies to reduce the amount of energy used in labs and fume cupboards and fit solar panels on the roof space to generate power. The funding has been made through a pilot initiative to explore how UK Research Partnership Investment Fund (UKRPIF) – funded research centres and facilities can be enhanced to tackle net zero carbon emission targets.

Created in collaboration with Unilever, the MIF is a 12,000m² state of the art facility dedicated to the research and development of advanced materials. It provides laboratory and office space for more than 300 University researchers, scientists and commercial innovators. It boasts one of the highest concentrations of materials science automation robotics in the world and is pioneering their use to accelerate the discovery and development of net zero materials and processes.

The Leverhulme Centre provides a home for blue skies thinking. The University of Liverpool is also partnering with industry to build the most up-to-the-minute tools for taking scientific discoveries and for commercializing them. This is being done through the new Materials Innovation Factory (MIF), which opens officially this week.

No ordinary factory, the MIF is a partnership between the University of Liverpool and Unilever, with a unique mix of disciplines in one building – robotics, computer science, physics, chemistry, and nanomedicine. The MIF is an open-access facility and staff will be trained in using state-of-the-art technology. As well as maximizing the use of scientific infrastructure by supporting industrial research, MIF provides an exchange of ideas across multidisciplinary teams, creating those vital sparks that take science forward. An advanced robotic formulation platform – currently being built at the university – will enable researchers to make and test complex mixtures very quickly, and to develop better formulations of everything from paints to pharmaceuticals. Iterative, manual methods will be replaced by mathematical models of the function required in a formulation, with robotics identifying the optimal components. This so-called ‘Formulation Engine’ will carry out automated processing, including operations such as mixing, heating and cooling, thus enabling researchers to see how materials behave under a wide range of conditions. The Formulation Engine will cater for large scale industrial application testing, as well as operating on a small scale for academic use.

Innovative robotics systems such as the Formulation Engine can also bring more reliability and reproducibility into the partners’ research, freeing researchers to focus on scientific understanding. The platform is also designed to be fast, thus accelerating research progress and enabling companies to design new products and processes much more quickly. ‘We will revolutionise the way that academia and industry in the UK performs research in materials science,’ claims Managing Director Simon Longden.

The first industrial projects are with Unilever, focusing on home and personal care products. Academic programmes will tackle problems as diverse as renewable energy and nano-medicine, but with a shared vision for speeding up research.

Applications

One important research area that will be accelerated by the Materials Innovation Factory is work on porous materials and their application in producing and storing fuels such as hydrogen.

One potential clean fuel is hydrogen, which produces only water when it is burned. To be truly sustainable, however, its production needs to be clean and efficient. Borrowing from nature’s mechanism to harness the sun’s energy in photosynthesis, Liverpool scientists, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, are working on a new hydrogen production route using photocatalysts. Like home and personal care products, Photocatalysts can be complex mixtures, so automation and formulation facilities at the Materials Innovation Factory will be crucial in unlocking the best combinations for efficient hydrogen production.

This project is part of a push to develop mass-market hydrogen-fuelled vehicles in China, as the country tries to cut carbon emissions and tackle air pollution. The University is working with two Chinese organisations and the UK-based company, UlemCo. This Liverpool company has developed hydrogen combustion engines that can be retro-fitted onto diesel vehicles, allowing them to run on dual fuel.

Hydrogen must be carried on board these vehicles, but hydrogen gas is hard to store and to compress into a small space. Computational design can help to identify new materials that could absorb more hydrogen. That challenge has crossovers with other work in Professor Cooper’s team on carbon capture and removing atmospheric pollutants. In particular, they have designed an organic material that can capture formaldehyde, which is a known carcinogen that is released from materials in newly constructed buildings. Work at the MIF is enabling the development of a prototype air filter for eventual use in homes and offices.

By embracing the materials design challenge, the University of Liverpool plans to keep the UK at the forefront of global materials research.

* Leverhulme partners: The Hartree Centre; the Diamond Light Source; King Abdullah University of Science and Technology; Max Planck Institute for Microstructure Physics; Imperial College; University of Southampton; The Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre.

The building and technology within it needed to enable the use of Computer Aided Materials Science (CAMS) and high-throughput (HT) automation we aim to develop new approaches to materials science, re-thinking potential applications and bringing it into the 21st Century.  The potential that new, and at scale, aggregations of automation, control and cognitive computing can offer is limitless.

The £18m MIF building collaboration between Unilever and the University of Liverpool boasts 85,000 sq ft facility will be constructed using funds from the £33m grant to Unilever and the university from the Government’s Research Partnership Investment Fund. It is occupied by 140 university researchers and over 100 researchers from industry partners. The MIF will produce new materials for sectors such as energy, pharmaceuticals, food and drink and paints.

Professor Wiebe Van Der Hoek, Executive Pro Vice-Chancellor for the University’s Faculty of Science & Engineering, said: “The MIF is a leading centre for advanced materials research and innovation with unique facilities.

“This project will allow us to take a holistic approach to the environmental sustainability of such a large-scale and high-energy use chemistry research facility.”

“Our joined up approach will have a marked impact on the carbon footprint of the MIF, and we will ensure that this approach is transferable to other large and complex lab environments, both on the University campus and in the wider HE and research sector.”

Research England Executive Chair, David Sweeney, said:

“The UK Research Partnership Investment Fund has a strong track record in funding state-of-art facilities that support world-leading research and strengthen partnerships between universities and other organisations active in research.

“By piloting these innovative approaches to tackling net zero in infrastructure, we hope that this scheme will help us to learn more about what works so that we and the HE sector can factor this into future activity and build upon the already successful UKRPIF model.”

The Materials Innovation Factory will house the Leverhulme Research Centre for Functional Materials Design, created to drive a design revolution for functional materials at the atomic scale. The prestigious award from the Leverhulme Trust will help to bridge the current design gap by fusing leading-edge synthesis concepts from the physical sciences with ideas from the forefront of computer science, alongside experts in robotics, engineering, management and social science.