Exeter researchers team up with international partners including NASA to develop cutting-edge new materials

Researchers at the University of Exeter will team up with international collaborators including NASA to develop advanced new materials that could be used to create sensors in space to detect carbon emissions from Earth, and smaller, lighter mobile phones.

It is among 12 projects announced today bringing together UK and international researchers to develop cutting-edge new technologies, funded through a £17 million investment from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

The team at Exeter has been awarded a £1.5 million grant to develop new metamaterials, materials whose structure is designed to give bespoke functionality and performance beyond what nature offers.

As they are adaptable, reconfigurable and programmable they have an enormous range of applications, including so-called ‘hyper-spectral’ sensors capable of analysing a wide spectrum of light to monitor Earth’s emissions and climate from space.

Other uses range from energy-efficient optical computing and smaller, lighter mobile phones to increasing wireless network capacity, emissions sensors and real-time image manipulation in Augmented Reality.

Exeter have teamed up with a wide range of international partners in the project, including the National Science Foundation Industry-University Cooperative Research Center for Metamaterials, NASA, Ball Aerospace, Phoebus Optoelectronics and The City University of New York in the US, and M.Ventures (Merck) in the Netherlands.

UK partners include Airbus, BAE Systems, Bodkin Design, British Telecommunications, Dstl, Metamaterial Technologies, Oxford Instruments, QinetiQ, Thales, Transense Technologies and Wave Optics.

Professor Alastair Hibbins, lead researcher at Exeter, said: “Metamaterials provide a new way to control the information and energy in the world around us. But as our connected lives become ever more complex, so do the devices that we use.

“Conventionally, metamaterials are fixed in the way they function or perform, so making them tunable or reconfigurable offers enormous application potential. 

“We can reconfigure wireless network systems to increase their capacity, or change the way the antenna works in your mobile phone to make it smaller and lighter.

“Perhaps most exciting of all, our work will lead to advances in the designs of super-fast and efficient analogue computing, or contribute to the way we use Augmented Reality displays.”