UK materials researchers turn to social science in pursuit of sustainable technologies
- PDF / 15,605,153 Bytes
- 2 Pages / 585 x 783 pts Page_size
- 30 Downloads / 157 Views
UK materials researchers turn to social science in pursuit of sustainable technologies
W
hen Alan Dalton developed environmentally friendly radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, he faced the challenge of commercializing the technology. To see how they might do this, his group, at the University of Sussex, in the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences where he is a professor, teamed up with social scientists at the university’s Digital Futures at Work Research Centre (Digit Centre), part of a new £8 million investment by the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK. Working with Walmart and Advanced Material Development, a company created to capitalize on the group’s materials research, Dalton and the social scientists are studying how RFID tags are developed and implemented and how they affect employment in the retail sector.
Nanotech graphene inks could print waste. Credit: University of Sussex.
The conductive inks came about as part of a research project on fundamental materials physics funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program. The Sussex researchers studied how to use graphene and other nanomaterial inks in applications for devices that needed electrical and/or thermal conductivity. The work at Sussex resulted in a “platform technology” that makes it possible to tune the rheology and formulation of the inks so that ink-jet, screen, and flexographic printing, for example, could deposit them as antennas on a range of substrates. The challenge is to understand how to persuade a long-established sector— the global RFID market, estimated to be worth USD$11 billion in 2018—to adopt a new technology. “In trying to decipher whether there was a market for a green solution to removing metals from RFID antenna, I approached professor Jacqueline O’Reilly [co-director of the Digit Centre],” Dalton tells MRS Bulletin. With added backing from the company, the project will, Dalton says, support an Innovation Fellow who will carry out research “to understand the marketplace and how this carbon-based technology might act as a disruptor on the market.” The Sussex project is part of a growing trend as researchers try to meet the growing pressure to eco-friendly RF tags that cut develop sustainable
materials. Social scientists are also informing the work of the Henry Royce Institute—a funded entity of the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council in the UK—which recently started the move into its new building in Manchester (MRS Bulletin, Volume 42, June 2017). “I think the interplay between our social and material worlds is an essential component of responsible innovation,” says Michael Shaver, a professor at The University of Manchester. Shaver’s research at the Royce Institute, where he holds the interesting title of Sustainable Materials Champion, focuses on all aspects of polymers, from research into new materials through to their role in society. Shaver, who describes himself as “a plastics guy” as well as the driver of the “social stuff” at the Royce Institute, talked about
Data Loading...
