Overview
The project will contribute to understanding the process of, and development of new chemistries for, depositing functional coatings on glass with a major industrial collaborator (NSG/Pilkington). The project will make use of state-of-the-art characterisation to understand the process and high throughput methodologies to develop new coating formulations and materials.
About this opportunity
Spray coating functional coatings onto large area of glass is an important industrial process. Understanding the detailed chemistry of the spray solutions is critical for obtaining high quality coatings and optimising the spray process and ultimately informing the formulation of solutions for chemistries of new coating materials. This project will investigate the detailed chemistry of industrial spray coating solutions, as used by NSG/Pilkington, to understand performance of the coated glass product. The student will use a wide variety of analytical techniques including extensive use of NMR, along with FTIR, Raman, SAXS, XRD, electron microscopy on the solutions and resulting coatings to develop a detailed understanding of the solutions at different stages of use. From this understanding new chemistries and formulations will be explored using high-throughput methods to cover the broad chemical space available. The high-throughput workflow will require the development of automated screening tests e.g. optical measurements, contact angle measurements, to assess the performance of the formulations once coated onto glass and then using statistical analysis to understand the critical parameters in the formulations.
Other NSG/Pilkington supported students are developing new coating materials, high-throughput materials discovery workflows and analysis tools, and machine learning models which will be used in the project to assist in developing the high-throughput workflow and identifying new target materials as coatings on glass.
The academics involved in the supervision of the project have an existing close working relationship with NSG/Pilkington and have the required expertise to deliver the project. Prof Rosseinsky is an expert in new materials discovery complimented by Prof Blanc’s expertise in NMR which will be extensively used in this project. The project will be supported by a research coordinator in Prof Rosseinsky’s group; Dr Manning has expertise in materials synthesis and thin film deposition. The project will have extensive opportunities to work at the NSG/Pilkington Technical Centre at Lathom nr Ormskik.
This project is offered under the University of Liverpool EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Digital and Automated Materials Chemistry along with other studentships for students from backgrounds spanning the physical and computer sciences to start in October 2025. These students will develop core expertise in robotic, digital, chemical and physical thinking, which they will apply in their domain-specific research in materials design, discovery and processing. By working with each other and benefiting from a tailored training programme they will become both leaders and fully participating team players, aware of the best practices in inclusive and diverse R&D environments.