Materials technology is vital to industrial competitiveness and innovation across all sectors including healthcare and the environment. UK businesses which produce and process materials have an annual turnover around £200 billion, 15% of our GDP!

Three areas of expertise; structural materials, surface engineering and materials chemistry, and multifunctional materials cover the main thrusts of the materials work at NPL, with a strategic focus on:-

• Building a standards and measurement infrastructure for the use of new structural materials, such as composites and light alloys  (including major effort in Structural Health Monitoring for civil and other applications)
• Developing a measurement and modelling framework for the effective design and utilisation of coatings and surface engineered materials (including ultra-low friction coatings optimised for energy management, and new methods for microstructural characterisation of textured materials)
• Investigating the measurement issues regarding the emerging areas of functional and multifunctional materials (multiferroic and piezoelectric for example), nanomaterials and nanoprobes (including microfluidic device characterisation and modelling), biomaterials (tissue scaffolds and bioactive materials) and fuel cells (for automotive, land-based and portable application)
• Developing an understanding of input data uncertainty on predictive model outputs; and multiphysics and multiscale materials modelling such as molecular modelling and finite element computational techniques to determine the behaviour of measurement systems and assess material properties
• Validating the lifetime prediction of materials in important infrastructure applications, and providing test procedures concerned with measurement of materials behaviour under processing conditions to impact on sustainable and efficient production

Adoption of new materials - or their use in new applications - depends on an ability to understand, characterise and measure these materials throughout their working life.  This includes their processing properties, performance and durability.  NPL supports the DIUS strategy and has a leading role in measurement of materials and development of new international standards.