The Innovative Manufacturing and Construction Research Centre (IMCRC) will undertake a wide variety of work in the Manufacturing, Construction and product design areas. The work will be contained within 5 programmes:1. Transforming Organisations / Providing individuals, organisations, sectors and regions with the dynamic and innovative capability to thrive in a complex and uncertain future2. High Value Assets / Delivering tools, techniques and designs to maximise the through-life value of high capital cost, long life physical assets3. Healthy & Secure Future / Meeting the growing need for products & environments that promote health, safety and security4. Next Generation Technologies / The future materials, processes, production and information systems to deliver products to the customer5. Customised Products / The design and optimisation techniques to deliver customer specific products.Academics within the Loughborough IMCRC have an internationally leading track record in these areas and a history of strong collaborations to gear IMCRC capabilities with the complementary strengths of external groups.Innovative activities are increasingly distributed across the value chain. The impressive scope of the IMCRC helps us mirror this industrial reality, and enhances knowledge transfer. This advantage of the size and diversity of activities within the IMCRC compared with other smaller UK centres gives the Loughborough IMCRC a leading role in this technology and value chain integration area. Loughborough IMCRC as by far the biggest IMRC (in terms of number of academics, researchers and in funding) can take a more holistic approach and has the skills to generate, identify and integrate expertise from elsewhere as required. Therefore, a large proportion of the Centre funding (approximately 50%) will be allocated to Integration projects or Grand Challenges that cover a spectrum of expertise.The Centre covers a wide range of activities from Concept to Creation.The activities of the Centre will take place in collaboration with the world's best researchers in the UK and abroad. The academics within the Centre will be organised into 3 Research Units so that they can be co-ordinated effectively and can cooperate on Programmes.

Mechanical metamaterials are materials that are specially designed to have unprecedented mechanical properties and multi-physics characteristics beyond those of classical natural materials. The properties of mechanical metamaterials are defined by their topology and geometrical architecture, and the characteristics of the materials which they are made from. Changing any of these directly affects the structural response and allows us to explore new areas in the material property space. Interesting properties that metamaterials exhibit include zero and negative Poisson's ratio leading to unexpected behaviour when subjected to mechanical stresses and strains, zero and negative stiffness, ability to absorb/dissipate energy and ability to isolate vibration. These properties give metamaterials high industrial value as illustrated by the global metamaterials market, valued at $1.5 billion in 2022 and forecast to grow to $22.9 billion by 2028. The focus of I5M is Mechanical Constant-Force MetaMaterials (CFMMs). These can deliver a quasi-constant output force over a range of input displacements (i.e., they can apply a constant pressure on a surface or object). This means they can act as passive force regulation and vibration isolation devices without any need for sensors and complex electromechanical control systems and have potential to be used in many applications such as robotic automation, overload protection, and precision manipulation. Despite recent advances in materials and manufacturing, CFMM development suffers drawbacks such as limited material selection and working range, unrealistic theoretical assumptions, high computational cost, need for assembly, material waste, and ignored fatigue performance. These drawbacks mean that a huge portion of the CFMM design space remains untouched. To address these challenges, a methodologic breakthrough is required that seamlessly integrates the four pillars of CFMM development: material, modelling, design, and manufacturing. Hyper-ThermoVisco-Pseudoelastic (HTVP) materials like Thermoplastic Polyurethane (TPU) have a nonlinear stress-strain behaviour and possess an inherent energy dissipation capability with excellent toughness and cyclic fatigue resistance. Employing the inherent energy dissipation feature of HTVP materials and unique behaviour of CFMMs along with advances in 3D printing can realise CFMMs with tailorable static and dynamic properties and open a vast design space meeting desired characteristics. This project aims to exploit inherent energy dissipation features of HTVP materials and develop an Integrated Material-Modelling-Manufacturing paradigm to create a new class of Mechanical metamaterials so-called Meta-regulators (i.e., I5M) with minimal computational cost, material usage and expert interference. I5M will break new ground by creating and exploiting breakthroughs in HTVP materials with variable soft-to-stiff properties, triaxial normal-shear constitutive modelling, physics-informed machine learning for evolutionary inverse design, and sustainable 3D printing. I5M technology will represent a fundamentally new field of sustainable metamaterials paradigm and create passive HTVP meta-regulators with built-in functionalities such as with programmable quasi-zero stiffness, quasi-constant force regulation, tuneable vibration isolation and fatigue resistance. I5M will minimise the expert interference, for example, I5M will simply receive constant force-displacement response and vibration transmissibility as input, determine optimum material and geometrical parameters, and then 3D print a meta-regulator meeting those requirements. I5M will validate HTVP meta-regulators functionality via 4 demonstrators for healthcare, automotive, aerospace and sport industries.

Our 21st century lives will be increasingly connected to our digital identities, representations of ourselves that are defined from trails of personal data and that connect us to commercial and public services, employers, schools, families and friends. The future health of our Digital Economy rests on training a new generation of leaders who can harness the emerging technologies of digital identity for both economic and societal value, but in a fair and transparent manner that accommodates growing public concern over the use of personal data. We will therefore train a community of 80 PhD students with the interdisciplinary skills needed to address the profound challenges of digital identity in the 21st century. Our training programme will equip students with a unique blend of interdisciplinary skills and knowledge across three thematic aspects of digital identity - enabling technologies, global impacts and people and society - while also providing them with the wider research and professional skills to deliver a research project across the intersection of at least two of these. Our students will be situated within Horizon, a leading centre for Digital Economy research and a vibrant environment that draws together a national research Hub, CDT and a network of over 100 industry, academic and international partners. Horizon currently provides access to a large network of over 75 potential supervisors, ranging from from leading Professors to talented early career researchers. Each student will work with an industry, public, third sector or international partner to ensure that their research is grounded in real user needs, to maximise its impact, and also to enhance their employability. These external partners will be involved in co-sponsorship, supervision, providing resources and hosting internships. Our external partners have already committed to co-sponsor 30 students so far, and we expect this number to grow. Our centre also has a strong international perspective, working with international partners to explore the global marketplace for digital identity services as well as the cross-cultural issues that this raises. This will build on our success in exporting the CDT model to China where we have recently established a £17M International Doctoral Innovation Centre to train 50 international students in digital economy research with funding from Chinese partners. We run an integrated four-year training programme that features a bespoke core covering key topics in digital identity, optional advanced specialist modules, practice-led team and individual projects, training in research methods and professional skills, public and external engagement, and cohort building activities including an annual writing retreat and summer school. The first year features a nine month structured process of PhD co-creation in which students, supervisors and external partners iteratively refine an initial PhD topic into a focused research proposal. Building on our experience of running the current Horizon CDT over the past five years, our management structure responds to external, university and student input and manages students through seven key stages of an extended PhD process: recruitment, induction, taught programme, PhD co-creation, PhD research, thesis, and alumni. Students will be recruited onto and managed through three distinct pathways - industry, international and institutional - that reflect the funding, supervision and visiting constraints of working with varied external partners.