Coatings Innovation Prize to Surrey’s Soft Matter Group
Tuesday 10 July 2012
Researchers in the Soft Matter Physics Group at the University of Surrey have scooped a prize for their research on coatings.
A lecture presented by Prof. Joe Keddie has won the Innovation Prize at the Coatings Science International (CoSI) Conference , which was held in Noordwijk, The Netherlands from June 25th to 29th, 2012 and included a total of 34 lectures from around the world.
The Prize is awarded annually at the conference to recognise the most innovative research presented there. The Surrey team reported their new technology to create coatings with patterns of texture for applications ranging from microlenses to drag reduction. The process uses modulations in the evaporation rate to move polymer particles to targeted positions on a surface as a way to build up a desired textured.
The prize-winning lecture presented results obtained by Dr. Argyrios Georgiadis in his current project and previously during his PhD study. Dr. Georgiadis is currently collaborating with several industrial partners, including Akzo Nobel and Marks & Spencer, to transfer the coatings process to industrial production in a project funded by Surrey’s EPSRC Knowledge Transfer Account (KTA).
Alex Nicholas, an undergraduate from the University of Kent, with funding from the South East Physics Network (SEPNet), also contributed to the research. Additional contributions were made by two Surrey undergraduates, Fitri Muhamad and Shourya Khanna, and a PhD student, André Utgenannt, who is funded by SEPNet in a collaboration with the University of Southampton.
Prof Keddie said: “This Prize is a fitting recognition of the contributions made by Argyrios Georgiadis and others in the Soft Matter Group, who have developed our novel coatings process. It is also a pleasing outcome for the investments made by Surrey’s KTA and SEPNet.”
For further details see here.