STFC - Swansea University / TWI Regional B4I Pilot Centre, Wales.

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This goal of this proposal is to create a beamline-bridging industry-focussed centre for Wales. A beamline bridge is an activity (supported by local specialist facilities and expertise) that supports (bridges) access to STFC's national level scientific facilities and in particular (but not limited to) the ISIS neutron and Diamond light source beamlines (hence the name). Wales has a higher proportion of manufacturing based jobs than the rest of the UK and has clusters of large numbers of businesses of varying size from anchor companies to SMEs in a variety of sectors from metallurgy and green energy, to health solutions and semiconductor fabrication. However, this region does not access STFC facilities at the same level as similar businesses based in the South and East of England. This activity aims to address this disparity by First: Informing local industry of the capabilities of the local and national facilities and inviting expressions of interest, Second: Aiding in design of experimentation and completing proof of concept studies locally and Third: Supporting access to STFC facilities including post-acquisition data analysis and interpretation. The proposed centre will be built on existing facilities and expertise based at both The Welding Institute - South Wales (TWI) and Swansea University's (SU) Advanced Imaging of Materials (AIM) Facility. Together these facilities represent a critical mass of characterisation capability and expertise un-paralleled in the region. However, significant experience serving both local industry and academic partners has highlighted the limitations in capability even of these advanced techniques that can only be addressed at national level facilities, such as those provided by STFC. It is these facilities and this knowledge and experience that TWI and AIM will draw on to support local businesses on their pathway to the beamlines. The centre will employ business development officers (BIBOs) that will initially be seconded to STFC and then return to the region to utilise the contacts and expertise they have acquired to engage local industry, assess levels of interest and support them from proof concept to data analysis. Local industry will be engaged first and foremost via TWIs and SU's own industry engagement mechanisms (representing hundreds of companies in the region). However, BIBOs will publicise the centre's activities at relevant industry conferences and strategic partners EEF (The Manufacturers Organisation -who have a network of 25,000 companies) will broaden engagement significantly.The centre will be closely aligned to Innovation Wales, Welsh Government's (WG) Smart Specialisation implementation plan with WG as a partner in the centre. The centre will interact with representatives of key clusters identified in this strategy such as the SPECIFIC IKC and the compound semiconductor cluster. Expected direct impacts of the activities include: Increased utilisation of state-of-the-art characterisation facilities with Wales, Increased and improved industrial research and development activity, Increase in pan-supply chain, inter-industrial and industry-academic research activity and critically, Improved utilisation of STFC facilities from within Wales. However, it is also expected that these direct benefits will cascade into indirect impact such as: increased job creation, increased economic output (and GVA) in Wales and contributions to UK technological and environmental targets.