Underinvestment in Manufacturing in the UK over the past decade has left this vital pillar of the economy exposed. OECD statistics show this starkly when comparing the UK to competitors whose sectors have grown since the start of the new millennium - the UK has- The largest proportion of low technology companies - The lowest proportion of employees in manufacturing- The lowest R & D spend as a function of GDP- The highest wage costs when compared to productivity.The recent economic crisis has highlighted the UK's over dependence on the financial services sector. Countries such as France and Germany with larger and growing manufacturing bases both emerged from the global recession more rapidly than the UK. This gap in support for the manufacturing sector has been recognised by EPSRC who made provisions to stimulate new IMRCs and doctorate training centres which can support UK manufacturing through close collaboration with the science base at universities.MATTER is a new initiative at Swansea specifically targeted at high technology advanced manufacturing and exploits the considerable experience of running industry facing doctorate centres at Swansea University. MATTER will be run in the multidisciplinary research environment provided in the School of Engineering at Swansea spanning all three research centres - computational, materials and nanotechnology. It will be led by a team of highly experienced researchers representing a wide range of expertise across the centres. Swansea has been a pioneer of the EngD concept since its inception in 1992. The award winning research and training partnerships continue with two highly focused doctoral training partnerships for the steel industry in Wales and for structural metallic systems for gas turbines. Swansea is also the lead organisation on the ERDF funded project ASTUTE to support Advanced Sustainable Manufacturing Technologies in Wales with postdoctoral research and extensive knowledge transfer activities from academia to industry. Manufacturing also strongly features in the HEFCW funded project to establish ArROW, an Aerospace Research Organisation Wales, which is led by Swansea University. The latter is to build research capacity, but it lacks funds for the critical element of doctoral students to more extensively engage with industry.In analysing technical roadmapping documents from the packaging and the aerospace industries, and the portfolio of support offered to manufacturing industries, Swansea University has identified key gaps and opportunities to work with the supply chains in Packaging, Automotive and Aerospace specifically outside of the EU convergence areas covered by existing funding. Within these technology clusters are key cross cutting themes, lean principles, sustainability, and value added. The gap in support will be filled through the generation of an advanced manufacturing centre that will train a minimum of 26 engineering doctorate research engineers, adding value to the training schemes already in place to service the Welsh convergence regions. MATTER will concentrate on increasing the intellectual value of the products and processes in order to add value through innovation, decreasing the commodity element of much of the UK sector. A key area of focus for MATTER will be improving processes to minimise waste and to improve quality.The existing infrastructure at Swansea University will underpin MATTER maximising the number of students that can be trained. Swansea will contribute 56% of the fees along with the provision of training costs and administration support from within their extensive infrastructure build up around several large scale projects, such as STRIP, ASTUTE and ArROW. Industry will also make a considerable additional contribution both in terms of in kind support and cash. The combined contribution from industry and Swansea University to MATTER will provide approximately 2 for every 1 requested from EPSRC.

In the UK there are more than four billion square metres of roofs and facades forming the building envelope. Most of this could potentially be used for harvesting solar energy and yet it covers less than 1.8 % of the UK land area. The shared vision for SPECIFIC is develop affordable large area solar collectors which can replace standard roofs and generate over one third of the UK's total target renewable energy by 2020 (10.8 GW peak and 19 TWh) reducing CO2 output by 6 million tonnes per year. This will be achieved with an annual production of 20 million m2 by 2020 equating to less than 0.5% of the available roof and wall area. SPECIFIC will realise this by quickly developing practical functional coated materials on metals and glass that can be manufactured by industry in large volumes to produce, store and release energy at point of use. These products will be suitable for fitting on both new and existing buildings which is important since 50% of the UKs current CO2 emissions come from the built environment.The key focus for SPECIFIC will be to accelerate the commercialisation of IP, knowledge and expertise held between the University partners (Swansea, ICL, Bath, Glyndwr, and Bangor) and UK based industry in three key areas of electricity generation from solar energy (photovoltaics), heat generation (solar thermal) and storage/controlled release. The combination of functionality will be achieved through applying functional coatings to metal and glass surfaces. Critical to this success is the active involvement in the Centre of the steel giant Corus/Tata and the glass manufacturer Pilkington. These two materials dominate the facings of the building stock and are surfaces which can be engineered. In addition major chemical companies (BASF and Akzo Nobel as two examples) and specialist suppliers to the emerging PV industry (e.g. Dyesol) are involved in the project giving it both academic depth and industrial relevance. To maximise open innovation colleagues from industry will be based SPECIFIC some permanently and some part time. SPECIFIC Technologists will also have secondments to partner University and Industry research and development facilities.SPECIFIC will combine three thriving research groups at Swansea with an equipment armoury of some 3.9m into one shared facility. SPECIFIC has also been supported with an equipment grant of 1.2 million from the Welsh Assembly Government. This will be used to build a dedicated modular roll to roll coating facility with a variety of coating and curing functions which can be used to scale up and trial successful technology at the pre-industrial scale. This facility will be run and operated by three experienced line technicians on secondment from industry. The modular coating line compliments equipment at Glyndwr for scaling up conducting oxide deposition, at CPi for barrier film development and at Pilkington for continuous application of materials to float glass giving the grouping unrivalled capability in functional coating. SPECIFIC is a unique business opportunity bridging a technology gap, delivering affordable novel macro-scale micro-generation, making a major contribution to UK renewable energy targets and creating a new export opportunity for off grid power in the developing world. It will ultimately generate thousands high technology jobs within a green manufacturing sector, creating a sustainable international centre of excellence in functional coatings where multi-sector applications are developed for next generation manufacturing.