Swansea University is the host for the EPSRC/TSB funded Innovation and Knowledge centre, the Sustainable Product Engineering Centre for Innovative Functional Industrial Coatings (SPECIFIC). The SPECIFIC IKC has ambitious targets to create a new billion pound industry sector built on the principle of buildings as power-stations. The core collaborative partners include leading UK research institutes (e.g. ICL and Bath Universities) and internationally leading industry groups (e.g. Tata, BASF and Pilkington). Critically, the IKC is established after 9 months of operation in a purpose designed facility including state of the art labs and scale up facilities (a pilot production line) with industry and academic team members working together in a true open innovation model. Having established the centre and the core partnerships it is clear that to deliver the ambitious targets and create the new UK lead industry in functionally coated construction products the key final ingredient is the people. Whilst the existing team funded by EPSRC, TSB, the University and Industry is quite small (19 people in totality) the IKC is supported by a larger cohort of research students (currently 32 funded largely through ESF sources). It is this critical mass of young, enthusiastic, open minded individuals that catalyses the atmosphere and initial successes of the IKC. It is the aim for COATED that we can build on this initial momentum and support three entries of seven EngD students onto a new EngD programme based entirely on functional coatings. We have secured the support of the Welsh European funding office (WEFO) and Swansea University for one third of the funds. Our industry partners have committed one third of the funds and as such we feel the proposal represents good economic value to EPSRC. This EPSRC funding will be critical in enabling research partnerships with universities outside Wales (such as ICL, Bath and Oxford) and with international companies with a UK footprint who are not based in the Principality. In addition, these research engineers upon graduation will form a critical pillar of a knowledge transfer mechanism into the new industry sector. This proposal builds on the long term innovative and successful EngD programmes run at Swansea on Steel Technology introducing a new dimension of UK wide collaboration and with a clear focus on value creation for the UK economy. COATED represents an important expansion of EngD activity at Swansea and underpins the success of the IKC. The ambitions of the SPECIFIC IKC to deliver new technology, jobs and wealth creation can only be realised with the mix of experienced Technology Transfer Fellows, engaged industry and academic partners (provided through the IKC) and a continued supply of open minded enthusiastic researchers that COATED can offer. A key new development will be the engagement with Oxford, Bath and Imperial at EngD level as this will bring cluster activity within those institutions where currently SPECIFIC has a single postdoctoral researcher. In addition, the EPSRC funding will allow for collaboration with companies across the UK and with multinational partners with a UK footprint. A key output from COATED alongside the technological and scientific innovations will be the people who will form part of the emerging new industry creating buildings that are power-stations. The alignment of Welsh Government, Industry and EPSRC that this programme offers will deliver these benefits with minimal financial contribution and could be an important model for how the funding organisations can work successfully together in the future to deliver value to the UK economy.

The EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Industrial Functional Coatings: COATED2 will extend and enhance doctoral training provision provided by the current EPSRC CDT COATED. This new CDT will provide 40 EngD research engineers (REs) over 4 cohorts beginning in 2015 to provide critical support to the EPSRC/TSB funded SPECIFIC Innovation and Knowledge Centre (IKC) hosted by Swansea University. The main aim of SPECIFIC is to rapidly develop and up-scale functional coated materials on steel and glass that generate, store and release energy creating buildings as power stations. In the UK more than 4billion m2 of roofs and facades could be used to harvest solar energy. SPECIFIC's vision is to use such surfaces to generate up to one 1/3 of the UK's target renewable energy by the 2020s. This is based on using 20million m2 by 2020, less than 0.5% of the available area. Development of such coatings will lead to an enhancement of value in current manufacturers and the evolution of new industries generating wealth and jobs in the UK. This CDT will furnish these evolving industries with highly skilled graduates whilst providing leaders of industry to existing manufacturers and substrate producers. SPECIFIC supported by COATED REs has made rapid progress and a pilot production line has been established at the IKC opened by Vince Cable MP and Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones in 2012. The input of current REs into the IKC has led to 2 potential commercial products and 8 patents during the first 2 years of operation. The pilot line provides dedicated up-scaling capabilities to take technologies from lab to production in a matter of days or weeks rather than years. As such, these world-class facilities provide a dynamic environment for the development, up scaling and production of innovative functional coated products and the CDT therefore fulfills the EPSRC priority area of complex manufactured products. Not only this but the technical focus of products researched and up-scaled in the CDT will support other priority themes including solar, energy storage, functional materials and sustainable use of materials and thus provides a rapid route through Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs) 1-6 for a number of critical future technologies. The COATED2 programme will continue to provide research and training in the area of functional coatings that will underpin the research and scale-up activities occurring at SPECIFIC. The brief of the CDT will be enhanced to support the new EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing (CIM) in Large Area Electronics of which the Welsh Centre for Printing and Coating (WCPC) at Swansea University is a key partner. The WCPC activities are critical to both SPECIFIC and the CIM as the development of large scale printing process are key for the production of the functional coatings technologies developed at SPECIFIC. Thus, REs will directly support activities that will influence both large-scale EPSRC projects. Further enhancement will come in the form of research aligned with Imperial College London (ICL) as a number of collaborative projects are active with ICL linked to Plastic Electronics and their CDT in this field through SPECIFIC and the WCPC. The strategic working partnership between Swansea and partner universities will be strengthened in 2013 by a £6.6million Welsh Government investment in a Solar Energy Futures Lab bringing leading ICL and Oxford University scientists to the IKC to support the science behind innovation for the full period of the COATED2 CDT. This will provide COATED2 REs with access to these scientists and benefit from the synergy of complementary projects supported through each University/CDT with cross fertilisation through the IKC. This activity of RE support for the IKC and CIM with cluster projects involving partner institutions provides a flourishing and vibrant research environment with world class facilities on hand to facilitate research and success.