Graphene hub to be part of new engineering base

THE University of Manchester is planning to relocate all of its engineering courses to a base close to its new £61m National Graphene Institute.

The new building on Booth Street East is due to be built next year as a base for the commercialisation of graphene – the super-light, super-strong material discovered by Manchester’s Nobel prize winning scientists Professors Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov.

According to the university’s vice chancellor it will be part of a new engineering centre along with departments currently based at the North Campus – the former UMIST buildings on the southern edge of the city centre.

She was speaking at a City Conversations event on technology and innovation yesterday, organised by Manchester city centre management firm CityCo, but the move has not yet been confirmed by the university which first signalled its desire to leave the UMIST campus early last year.

“We’ll be moving all the engineering to that site,” she said. “And we’re bidding to the European Regional Development Fund to finance further development.”

Referring to the graphene hub, she added: “It will be the most advanced clean facility in the world, taking ideas from basic discovery to prototype.”

Dame Nancy said one of the challenges faced by the university on graphene was attracting interest from UK companies. “Many British companies say, ‘Graphene is too early, too scary, we don’t know what to do with it’.”

But writing in the publication Nature, Prof Kostya Novoselov and an international team of authors has produced a ‘Graphene Roadmap’ which sets out what the material can achieve.

The paper details how graphene has the potential to revolutionise diverse applications from smartphones and ultrafast broadband to anti-cancer drugs and computer chips. One key area is touchscreen devices which could be available in three to five years.

Rollable ‘e-paper’ is another application which should be available as a prototype by 2015. The paper was written with colleagues from Lancaster University, Texas Instruments Incorporated, AstraZeneca, BASF and Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology.

Also speaking at the vent was Scott Fletcher, chairman of Manchester software and cloud computing group ANS.

He stressed the importance of apprentices in driving forward Manchester’s ambitions to become a pioneering ‘tech city’.

He said: “There is no sitting back on past glories in our industry, it’s all about constant reinvention and innovation and investment in young talent is the essential fuel for that transformation and growth.”