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我的愿景是能够可靠地大规模制造具有复杂三维结构的新型先进有机或混合有机/无机材料。先进材料是一种具有新特性的材料，使公司能够开发新型高价值产品以满足市场需求，并在此过程中产生增长和高技术出口。尖端制造业是英国创造财富的关键。英国无法在低技术（商品）材料领域竞争：这些材料现在是在劳动力市场成本低的国家制造的。为了制造一种先进的材料，我们必须详细了解它的结构。这意味着能够在许多长度尺度（纳米到毫米）上观察和测量它，然后使用这些信息来了解它的物理特性。一旦我们了解了如何在实验室环境中创建材料，下一个挑战就是扩大处理能力。通常，制造过程本身对材料的微观结构有很大的影响，从而影响其物理性能。这就形成了一个发展周期。为了保持理想的性能，通过预测建模和重新检查微观结构来改变工艺变量。目的是确定对产品输出能力和可靠性有重大影响的工艺步骤。该项目将直接与工业合作伙伴合作，使用识别微观结构的新方法，为产品开发周期提供信息。工业合作伙伴都是对能源领域感兴趣的英国大型公司：一家致力于开发用于储能的聚合物组件;另一家致力于新型低成本太阳能电池的升级工艺技术。对于这两种材料系统，应用性能的成功取决于复杂的层次结构。科学家和工程师们已经意识到，这往往不仅是材料本身，而且是不同规模的不同结构安排相互作用的方式。除了研究直接商业应用的材料外，该项目还旨在收集具有复杂层次结构的非常相似的天然材料（特别是蜘蛛丝）中所包含的信息。由于缺乏能够准确观察其组成和复杂结构的测量仪器和方法，这类聚合物的先前开发受到阻碍。我的目标是完善一种新型的电子显微镜，我已经开发，以测量，从纳米到毫米的尺度，软物质的性质，定义其电气和结构性能。这将根据我的工业合作者的特殊需求进行定制，但这项技术也将有更广泛的应用。例如，我还将使用我的方法来尝试解锁在天然材料丝绸中发现的确切结构机制-它具有非凡的特性，但还不知道如何在人造等价物中保留这些特性。在一位为复杂层次结构开发了可扩展机械模型的土木工程专家的支持下，我的目标是建立一个可扩展模型，以帮助预测工艺参数变化与材料性能之间的联系。这将使用我的新表征方法进行通知。最后，根据研究结果，我希望汇集工业和学术合作伙伴的知识，对这些技术和经济上重要的材料的开发周期有更全面的了解。

My vision is to enable reliable large-scale manufacturing of novel advanced organic or hybrid organic/inorganic materials which have complex three-dimensional structure. An advanced material is one with new properties that allows companies to develop novel high-value products to meet market needs, and in doing so generate growth and high-technology exports. Cutting-edge manufacturing is key to wealth creation in the UK. The UK cannot compete in the low technology (commodity) materials sector: these are now manufactured in countries with low cost labour markets. To manufacture an advanced material, we have to understand its structure in detail. This means being able to observe and measure it over many length scales (nanometres to millimetres), and then use that information to understand its physical characteristics. Once we have understood how to create a material in the laboratory setting, the next challenge is to scale-up processing capability. Often the manufacturing process itself has a big impact on the microscopic structure of the material, and hence its physical properties. This leads to a development cycle. To maintain desirable properties, process variables are changed, informed by predictive modelling and re-examination of the microscopic structure. The aim is to identify process steps that critically impact on the product output capacity and reliability. This project will work directly with industrial partners to use novel ways of discern microscopic structure so as to inform the product development cycle.The industrial partners are both large UK firms with interests in the energy sector: one working on developing polymer components for energy storage; the other working on up scaling process technologies for new types of low cost solar cells. For both materials systems, application performance success hinges on complex hierarchical structures. Scientists and engineers have realised that is often not only the material itself, but the way different structural arrangements, each at a different scale, interact with one another. As well as studying materials of immediate commercial application, this project also aims to harvest the information contained in very similar natural materials which also have complex hierarchical structures (spider silk in particular). Prior development of this class of polymers has been hampered by the absence of measurement instruments and methods capable of accurately observing their composition and complex structure. I aim to refine a new type of electron microscopy that I have developed in order to measure, from the scale of nanometres to millimetres, soft-matter properties that define their electrical and structural performance. This will be tailored to the particular needs of my industrial collaborators, but the technique will also have much wider application. For example, I will also use my method to try to unlock the exact structural mechanisms that are found in the natural material silk - which has extraordinary properties as yet it is not understood how to retain these in the man-made equivalent. With the support of a visiting civil engineering expert who has developed scalable mechanical models for complex hierarchical structures, I aim to build a scalable model that will help to predict the link between process parameter variation and resulting materials properties. This will be informed using my new characterisation method. Finally, in the light of the results from the research, I hope to pool the knowledge gained from both the industrial and academic partners to formulate a more general understanding of the development cycle for these technologically and economically important class of materials.