Materials science consultancy Lucideon is celebrating two major achievements – one championing ceramics skills for the future and the other a breakthrough for battery innovation.
The Stone-based company has helped to fund a new academy which will provide next-generation training and development programmes that address emerging industry challenges and tackle a skills gap in both traditional and advanced ceramics.
More than £320,000 was assigned to create and launch the AMRICC Academy, which is located within the AMRICC Centre, a £10 million world-first research facility launched last year and sponsored by Lucideon.
The academy will offer a range of carefully curated educational packages in e-learning, in-person and customised training formats, with content that has been developed in consultation with industry experts. This includes advanced ceramics applications, data science, modelling, leadership development for technical environments and machine learning.
Richard Goodhead, Chief Marketing Officer at Lucideon said: “The ceramics sector is constantly evolving and staying ahead means addressing both emerging technologies and skills gaps.
“The AMRICC Academy will address this need by providing industry-led training, developed by experts in ceramics and materials science.
“Geared towards those who are new to the sector, and to broaden the expertise of personnel already in the industry, this is an exciting development that offers a progressive approach to tackle the sector’s skills gap.
“The academy also aligns with The AMRICC Centre’s remit to provide an educational facility to train and support material scientists for the future, developing pipelines of talent from degree apprentices, through to post-doctoral graduates, to create new, educated, ambitious talent for the UK ceramics industry.”
Other funding for the academy came from UKRI through their flagship Strength in Places Fund Programme alongside input from the Midlands Industrial Ceramics Group members.
Meanwhile, a pilot project involving Lucideon technology has delivered a step-change in the process of manufacturing a type of battery that reduces the demands on earth’s scarce resources.
Under the programme, scientists, engineers, and academics have pioneered a novel way to make the manufacture of sodium ion battery materials faster and more sustainable as part of a 12-month feasibility project supported by UKRI’s £318 million Faraday battery challenge fund.
Partners have delivered significant scale-up and sustainability benefits by working together to deploy the use of Flash Sintering, an advanced technology that involves the application of an electric field to a material via customised electrodes to achieve a concise, high temperature heating rate with pinpoint accuracy.
This approach reduces the amount of energy needed, with the heat directly targeted at the material being processed.
The project involved Batri, a developer of sodium-ion electrode materials, and Swansea University’s Energy Storage Group.
Dr Gareth Jones, Lucideon’s Flash Sintering Technical Lead, said: “Working with Batri and Swansea University has shown that enhanced synthesis of battery electrode materials is an exciting new application for our Flash Sintering technology.
“This represents a significant advance in reducing the use of resources and energy efficiency, which could be key to driving the growth of a strong business in the UK.
“We now look forward not only to developing the approach into a production process but also identifying other applications that would benefit from faster and lower temperature processing of powders.”
