The manufacturing environment can be a harsh one for delicate instrumentation.
Now a Huddersfield University scientist has been awarded a government-backed fellowship to help him investigate ways for advanced technology to move from the controlled conditions of a laboratory to a busy factory production line.
Senior research fellow Dr Feng Gao has received his award under Innovate UK’s High Value Manufacturing Catapult – a project described as “the catalyst for the future growth and success of manufacturing in the UK”.
Fellowships awarded under the scheme are funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and designed to help firms develop new technologies through to commercial reality.
The Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) in County Durham is part of the HVM Catapult. Its specialities include printable electronics, such as rolls of flexible solar panels, embedded with photovoltaic cells.
Researchers at Huddersfield University’s EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Advanced Metrology have played an important role in improving the quality control and reliability of these flexible solar panels, so that they can be manufactured more efficiently and economically.
Under another research programme, the EPSRC Centre has developed new technologies to detect, clean and repair micro and nanoscale defects in the thin films that are vital in printed electronic products, using an award-winning Wavelength Scanning Interferometer, which can detect defects in the coatings of roll-to-roll flexible photovoltaic cells.
Dr Gao’s three-year HVM Catapult fellowship will see him investigate how to use the EPSRC Centre’s prototype instruments in the roll-to-roll production line at the Centre for Process Innovation.
Instruments normally used in an optical lab, where they are stabilised and protected, now have to be adapted so that they can be embedded into a round-the-clock factory production line, with conditions that can include a great deal of vibration.
Also, the roll-to-roll films are produced at great speed, adding to the difficulty of monitoring for defects.
Dr Gao has responded by developing a new inferometer that can compensate for the levels of vibration. During his Catapult fellowship, which lasts until 2016, he will pay repeated visits to the CPI to witness the processes at first hand.
Dr Gao is an expert in the research and development of industrial measuring instruments and has published more than 50 academic papers. In addition to his work on the HVM Catapult fellowship, Dr Gao’s current research includes the use of optical deflectometry as a means of measuring complex freeform surfaces such as lenses.printer earlier on?
