A one-day workshop on the Processing of Advanced Functional Polymers was held on 3 March at Nanoforce Technology Limited, a spin-out company from Queen Mary University of London.

The event was organised by the joint Doctoral Training Centre in “Plastic Electronics” at Imperial College and Queen Mary University of London, and the Functional Materials Committee of IOM3. The event was additionally supported by ImpactQM, the holders of an EPSRC funded Knowledge Transfer Account (KTA) at QMUL.

The purpose of the event was to provide hands-on training in materials processing to early-stage researchers. The participates, from academia and industry, spent the day learning about the latest processing techniques, including electrospinning, photo-embossing, liquid crystalline cholesteric processing, extrusion and dynamic percolation. The participants had the opportunity to get hands on experience and really make samples, rather than just receiving lectures and demonstrations.

The event organiser Christopher Reynolds of Nanoforce Technology said, “The idea was for the participants to get their hands dirty and use some of the new techniques in functional polymer processing. This provided them with the valuable opportunity to discover for themselves the positives and negatives of the different techniques, which they may use in their future careers”. 

The workshop will now run annually. It is the objective of the newly formed Functional Materials Committee of IOM3 to improve knowledge transfer and training in the latest processing technologies through such events. Later this year it is organising in collaboration with the Centre for Advanced Structural Ceramics (CASC) at Imperial College a Summer School on Ceramics, which includes the latest developments in ceramic processing. The aim of the committee is to establish a series of annual and bi-annual processing workshops covering the most important functional materials and latest techniques.

If you are interested in becoming involved with the committee or have ideas for future events, please contact Mike Reece, email: m.j.reece@qmul.ac.uk