In March 2020 we were contacted by UNHCR for help with PPE in the Zaatari refugee camp, using digital printing and sewing capabilities here at our UK Universities and in the camp. Our immediate response means that this work has already started. In both the UK and Jordan we have made prototypes of masks, shields and gowns and there have been co-created innovations in both design and joining technologies. With Agile Response funds we will run an interdisciplinary co-production project, comprising a socio-technical part focused on designing PPE for production in refugee camps and the host community, and socio-behavioural part, understanding how the availability of PPE affects people's attitudes and behaviours around risk, and so enables them to address health threats. Digital manufacturing and digital data gathering will be central, enabling real-time collaboration even without face-to-face contact. In Jordan - and other lower/middle income countries - there was very limited availability of PPE at the beginning of the pandemic in refugee camps, and UNHCR was only able to source materials for clinical needs. Whilst Jordan has done extraordinarily well in suppressing transmission of the virus, recording 11 deaths from 1100 cases, it has been at only been achieved through the result of a very severe economic and social lockdown and stringent defense laws being invoked. The UNHCR is preparing for Covid19 to a dramatic impact when it comes into densely populated camps, causing community transmission, as lock down is eased. There is a pressing need for supplies of PPE compliant with Jordanian (and other country) standards, yet with limited buying power neither the UN agency nor the government is well-placed to compete globally for supplies. The development need is thus for sustainable local manufacture, using a reliable supply of locally available, low-cost materials to produce PPE appropriate to refugees' needs. Simultaneously, the project will tackle the problem of plastic waste, (including discarded PPE), open employment opportunities in small-scale manufacturing, and build resilience within the camp community by reinforcing a sense of collective agency and capacity. The direct benefits of this research will accrue to the substantial refugee populations in Jordan, with outcomes also applicable to other low resource economies hosting displaced people. Building on existing technical prototyping activities, the project will increase knowledge on successfully producing PPE in the refugee context. The central innovation is to a) co-create the design, manufacture and distribution process with the refugees as partners and thus empowered agents, and b) to thus calibrate the process and outputs to the specific conditions in the camp. The refugee-led social research will address broader questions, currently insufficiently addressed in the literature, of the effects of PPE uptake on refugees' sense of agency, ability and willingness to play a role in preventing and treating COVID-19. We can move swiftly, as we have engineering and social science PDRAs from the UKRI #redefiningsingleuse grant ready and keen to go. In Jordan, UNHCR and Al Albayt University will train participatory action researchers (PARs) to engage in the design, manufacturing, and implementation of comprehensive reusable PPE (initially masks, shields and gowns, moving on to innovations in gloves and hand sanitiser). The University of Petra will use semi-structured interviews and PARs to understand the social/spatial aspect of PPE-associated behaviour in the confined environment of the camp.

We seek to create conformal sensors unlike existing electronics that exploit the ultra-thin form factor achieved by additive manufacture to offer flexible labels with sensing, wireless communication and energy harvesting to charge entirely integrated batteries. To achieve this, we must re-engineer antennas and batteries (the largest devices in wireless systems and which suffer poor efficiency from close integration). Our battery-assisted labels will be printed using sustainable inks with reclaimable materials for the circular economy. They will communicate at distances greater than passive alternatives and enable 'on object' or 'on-skin' monitoring, e.g. of atmospheric vapours or medical testing. Successful outcomes will provide unprecedented data from attach-and-forget smart labels that can be customised by overprinting with different sensing films. To achieve this our team of leading Wireless, Battery Formulation, and Digital Manufacturing researchers, will combine with the UK National Catapult for Printed Electrics. Previous battery-free (passive) UHF RFID based tag sensors proposed for smart connected ecosystems are inherently limited in their functionality (e.g. no data logging or analog to digital interface) and the communication range is a few metres or less. This limitation arises through the need to harvest sufficient power. A battery would overcome the range and functionality limitations, but at the cost of overall bulk due to battery volume, including holder size , and the physical separation needed between the conducting battery casing and the antenna in order to maintain radiation efficiency. Also, there are serious implications for the end of life of millions of pervasive sensing labels containing the materials commonly used in battery formulation. With these constraints and the expectation of interconnecting separate components, it will never be possible to produce truly thin label-like power-assisted electronics. The labels we propose will be inherently low energy in operation, but integrated battery assistance will make possible many potential applications including bio-sensing, pharma smart monitoring & patient compliance, security, industrial and domestic chemical, temperature, & power monitoring, and enable encryption in emerging big data nodes for Smart Connected Systems. To ensure deliverable outputs in this work, we will focus on creating proof of concept vapour sensing tags to address two identified needs. 1. We will develop labels to sense air pollution which is well known to reduce quality of life and attacks infrastructure through acid rain. 2. We will create atmospheric sensing labels for industrial processes and product testing as identified by our partner Givaudan. The team of RFID engineers, functional materials scientists, inkjet experts and the national Catapult for printed electronics will engineer efficient antennas on battery substrates, demonstrate ultrathin battery chemistries, suitable for additive manufacture that offer performance similar to commercial coin cells, create inks to print thin film Nitrogen Oxide sensors, create prototype sensing wireless labels by inkjet printing, and produce test runs of the devices using commercial roll-to-roll techniques. Our designs will be integrated into a demonstrator system that can read the tags and display results in an accessible way.

Our vision is to use continuous photochemistry and electrochemistry to transform how fine chemicals, agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals are manufactured in the UK. We aim to minimize the amount of chemicals, solvents and processing steps needed to construct complex molecules. We will achieve this by exploiting light and/or electricity to promote more specific chemical transformations and cleaner processes. By linking continuous photochemistry and electro-chemistry with thermal flow chemistry and environmentally acceptable solvents, we will create a toolkit with the power to transform all aspects of chemical synthesis from initial discovery through to chemical manufacturing of high-value molecules. The objective is to increase efficiency in terms of both atoms and energy, resulting in lower cost, low waste, low solvent footprints and shorter manufacturing routes. Historically photo- and electro-chemistry have been under-utilised in academia and industry because they are perceived to be complicated to use, difficult to scale up and engineer into viable processes despite their obvious environmental, energy and cost benefits. We will combine the strategies and the skills needed to overcome these barriers and will open up new areas of science, and deliver a step-change (i) providing routes to novel molecular architectures, hard to reach or even inaccessible by conventional methodologies, (ii) eliminating many toxic reagents by rendering them unnecessary, (iii) minimizing solvent usage, (iv) promoting new methodologies for synthetic route planning. Our proposal is supported by 21 industrial partners covering a broad range of sectors of the chemistry-using industries who are offering £1.23M in-kind support. Therefore, we will study a broad range of reactions to provide a clear understanding of the most effective areas for applying our techniques; we will evaluate strategies for altering the underlying photophysics and kinetics so as to accelerate the efficiency of promising reactions; we will transform our current designs of photochemical and electrochemical reactors, with a combination of engineering, modelling and new fabrication techniques to maximize their efficiency and to provide clear opportunities for scale-up; we will exploit on-line analytics to accelerate the optimisation of continuous photochemical and electrochemical reactions; we will design and build a new generation of reactors for new applications; we will identify the most effective strategies for linking our reactors into integrated multi-step continuous processes with minimized waste; we will demonstrate this integration on at least one synthesis of a representative pharmaceutical target molecule on a larger scale; we will apply a robust series of sustainability metrics to benchmark our approaches against current manufacturing.