Bath University is set to get a boost from Chancellor George Osborne’s promise of £50m to commercialise graphene – the super-hard new material that could revolutionise British industry.
The Chancellor used his speech at the Conservative Party Conference to pledge that the cash will go towards creating a new hi-tech hub that will help take graphene from the laboratory to the factory.
Graphene – a flat layer of carbon atoms in a honeycomb arrangement – is the strongest material known to science and conducts electricity better than any other known substance.
Bath University is one of eight UK universities undertaking cutting-edge research into the new material, which is being led by Manchester-based professors Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov, who were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics last for their work on graphene.
Bath and the University of Exeter have formed The Centre for Graphene Science to carry out research into uses of the material.
In Bath, research is focussing on ways of producing graphene for industrial use through highly-specialised areas such as nanofabrication and device prototyping and nanostencilling techniques.
The government hopes that graphene will give UK industry a world-beating material that will filter through to give the economy a significant boost and create much-needed jobs.
The Centre is the hub of an international network of leading institutions researching graphene, and is rapidly building connections with industry. The core of the The Centre for Graphene Science is formed by the two physics departments at Exeter and Bath.
The £50m investment was welcomed by Dr Robert Parker, chief executive of the Royal Society of Chemistry.
"It has been a rough ride for science in recent months, with real-terms cuts in spending now being implemented. This announcement by the Chancellor is good news and we hope it is not a one-off 'eye-catching' investment considering how much coverage has been devoted, deservedly so, to the possible applications of graphene in the future.”
