New-Tech Europe Magazine | Aug 2018

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CPI Working with MIF to Boost UK’s Innovation Capabilities

CPI is playing a pivotal role in advancing industry knowledge of formulated liquids. CPI has joined forces with the Materials Innovation Factory (MIF) to create a project focused on improving the high throughput production and characterisation of liquid formulations across consumer goods, such as shampoos, body washes, detergents, and paints.

Graeme Cruickshank, CPI Director of Formulation, said: “We are very proud to be part of this collaboration and playing such an important and proactive role in improving and joining up the UK innovation ecosystem. “We are committed to supporting research and development that will strengthen the formulation sector and optimise formulated products

The new collaboration will strengthen the UK’s innovation ecosystem by identifying additive capabilities and will drive inter-connectivity and data transfer across the Northern Powerhouse. This inter-connectivity will also facilitate cross-sector collaboration opportunities across all formulated product value chains. The collaboration builds on CPI’s expertise and successful track-record in formulation, which involves the creation of multi-component and often multi-phase products across markets including healthcare, food and drink, and personal care. CPI experts are taking time out from their National Formulation Centre to work at the MIF facility – using MIF’s high throughput systems to formulate and characterise complex emulsions. This characterization data is then combined with similar data generated at increasing production scales at CPI – ultimately leading to predictive models for formulating liquids from benchtop through to 1000 l. Researchers incorporate optoelectronic diodes into fibers and weave them into washable fabrics. The latest development in textiles and fibers is a kind of soft hardware that you can wear: cloth that has electronic devices built right into it. Researchers at MIT have now embedded high speed optoelectronic semiconductor devices, including light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and diode photodetectors, within fibers that were then woven at Inman Mills, in South Carolina, into soft, washable fabrics and made into communication systems. This marks the achievement of a long-sought goal of creating “smart” fabrics by incorporating semiconductor devices — the key ingredient of modern electronics — which until now

for a wide range of applications.” CPI enables the transition of ideas from academic, SME and large corporate partners to commercialisation, helping improve consumers’ lives and drive UK economic growth. The MIF research facility, based at the University of Liverpool, co- locates industrial and academic users, providing open-access to an array of high throughput robotic platforms and state-of-the-art analytical techniques. The aim is to upskill users, while accelerating their advanced experimental programmes. Jon Mercer, Programme Manager at the Materials Innovation Factory, added: “We are really excited to be working closely together with CPI. “Providing access to our MIF shared labs and linking up activity between two national facilities is great for the formulation community in the UK and will undoubtedly lead to a number of follow on projects.” was the missing piece for making fabrics with sophisticated functionality. This discovery, the researchers say, could unleash a new “Moore’s Law” for fibers — in other words, a rapid progression in which the capabilities of fibers would grow rapidly and exponentially over time, just as the capabilities of microchips have grown over decades. The findings are described this week in the journal Nature in a paper by former MIT graduate student Michael Rein; his research advisor Yoel Fink, MIT professor of materials science and electrical engineering and CEO of AFFOA (Advanced Functional Fabrics of America); along with a team from MIT, AFFOA, Inman Mills, EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland,

Introducing the latest in textiles: Soft hardware

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