Chemical Materials Design

The Chemical Materials Design (CMD) Research Area bridges two transformative opportunities—sustainability and automation/robotics—to advance materials chemistry and address the challenges of future materials innovation.

• Driving Sustainability: Supporting the design, evaluation, and circularity testing of materials to foster innovations and improvements in sustainability.
• Accelerating Innovation: Driving the wider utilisation of robotics and automation to advance the discovery and development of materials with desired properties and minimal environmental impact.
• Enabling Faster, Greener Synthesis: Delivering efficient and sustainable synthetic methods for chemical, catalytic, and biological materials.

To facilitate and support the accelerated design of new materials for a competitive, zero-carbon, and agile UK industry we will:

• Develop Materials 4.0 methods for rapid materials design, make and measure
• Contribute to UK policy-making for Industry 4.0 for producing materials at scale
• Establish the Sustainable Materials Innovation Hub (SMI Hub) to assist companies in all stages of the
  sustainable plastics agenda
• Develop the next generation of materials exploiting synthetic biology
• Deliver materials for “More than Moore” devices

CMD is committed to supporting the UK’s transition to a zero-carbon, agile, and globally competitive industry by prioritising:

• AI-Driven Sustainability: Using robotics and AI to revolutionise sustainable material discovery and innovation.
• Advancing the Circular Economy: Leading polymer research to promote circularity and minimise waste.
• Synthetic Biology: Designing next-generation materials through cutting-edge biomanufacturing techniques.
• Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Connecting expertise across sustainability, automation, and materials research to unlock synergies.
• Tackling Grand Challenges: Leveraging CMD’s integration with other Royce themes—such as electrochemical systems, biomaterials, modelling and characterisation—to address the UK’s most pressing materials challenges.

The CMD area capabilities focus on rapid discovery and testing of small molecules, inorganic materials, polymers, and biomaterials at TRLs 1-2, with strong links to the High Value Manufacturing (HMVC) and Centre for Process Innovation (CPI), Catapults, Knowledge Centre for Materials Chemistry (KCMC) and Organic Materials Innovation Centre (OMIC) to translate our knowledge to larger scales as well as to other national initiatives such as the Circular Economy Centres.