Cambridge centre receives over £2 million in innovation funding

The Cambridge Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction is amongst two of the UK’s Innovation and Knowledge Centres (IKCs), which are to receive a further £3.8 million of collaborative research funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

The funds are to build on their achievements in accelerating the commercialisation of world class science and emerging technologies.

The Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction (CSIC), which is based at the University of Cambridge, will receive nearly £2.2 million to:

• develop a team dedicated to deploying novel technologies and processes
• scale up and standardise technologies for early adoption by industry
• develop wider applications for technologies
• extend the range of sectors that research is directed towards

The Sustainable Product Engineering Centre for Innovative Functional Industrial Coatings (SPECIFIC) based at Swansea University will receive £1.65 million to:

• expand its solar energy research - working with the universities of Bath and Oxford
• commercialise solar water purification technology with Surrey University
• work with the University of Manchester on bio-inspired coatings
• commercialise a heated floor tile

Research at CSIC focuses on innovative use of emerging technologies in sensor and data management (e.g. fibre optics, MEMS, computer vision, power harvesting, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and Wireless Sensor Networks) coupled with emerging best practice in the form of applying the latest manufacturing and supply chain management approaches to construction and infrastructure. It aims to develop completely new markets and achieve breakthroughs in performance.

The outputs of the Centre will provide the construction industry and infrastructure owners and operators with the means to ensure that very challenging new performance targets can be met. Furthermore, the potential breakthroughs will make the industry more efficient and profitable. They will give UK companies a competitive advantage in the increasingly global construction market.

CSIC works closely with a large network of industry partners in developing the Centre’s strategic direction and in collaborative projects. To date, the Centre has over 30 demonstration projects and case studies.

In this Tranche 2 funding stage the team seek to build on the research and demonstration projects carried out in the Core programme and the Tranche 1 Collaborative Projects, with a strong focus on developing the outputs of these projects to be market ready, through development of the technologies into products and through standardisation of the deployment of sensor technologies in infrastructure environments and of the analysis of the data produced.

The Centre has created an 'incubator team' who will carry out product development activities and will deploy sensor technologies in the field, further demonstrating and refining CSIC's capability and demonstrating the value of this capability to the market. The team will be constituted so that it can respond rapidly to client demand for demonstration and deployment of technologies and interpretation of data, creating maximum value for our industry partners.

This will result in a number of outputs designed to catalyse widespread uptake in the infrastructure industry, including:

1. Specific commercialisation opportunities for the technologies through joint ventures, spin outs or licensing of IP;
2. Consulting services, deploying sensors to assist clients e.g. in monitoring sensitive structures during construction, understanding live performance of assets or designing new assets efficiently based on data from monitored assets;
3. Development of best practice guidance for structural health monitoring of assets, deployment of sensor networks, and analysis of data; and
4. Development of training packages for industry

In addition to this, CSIC will carry out further research to expand the capability of the Centre's technologies into new areas, as identified by its industry partners through meetings and workshops.