Coatings are key to the performance of most products and they contribute to sustainability by enhancing the efficiency and extending the life of the products that they protect, as well as by enabling the reduced use of scarce bulk materials. Therefore, coatings are a vital part of the nation's manufacturing industry, contributing to many sectors, including aerospace, energy, automotive and construction. However, until now the UK coatings industry has been severely lagging behind compared to High Value Manufacturing sectors in terms of all aspects of design, development, manufacture, and implementation into products, particularly in terms of the degree of digitalisation achieved (as epitomised in the "Industry 4.0" concept). This EPSRC NetworkPlus in Digitalised Surface Manufacturing is needed because currently there is no UK University that has all the required interdisciplinary expertise in surface engineering and digital manufacturing and there is a lack of 'connected' knowledge in the area of digitalisation of coating manufacturing processes in UK industry. The Network will bring together academic and industrial expertise in multiple disciplines to address the challenges of digitalising the UK coatings manufacturing sector. The Network will create a community that will be able to carry out innovative leading-edge research which will ultimately allow the coatings manufacturing industry to achieve the best-in-class levels of High Value Manufacturing. The development of a UK-wide network around digital methods for surface manufacturing can bring optimum manufacture processes ("right first time") to the surface engineering and advanced coatings community in the UK. The creation of this NetworkPlus will serve to capture and understand the current manufacturing scene and pump-prime digitalisation activity in this area. The new interdisciplinary research community developed within the Network will assist the UK PLC to develop manufacturing methods which are predictable, digital-enabled and more productive, providing the pathway to class-leading coating manufacturing processes. This will bring resilience and improved productivity across all key UK industrial sectors. End-users of the coatings industry span all sectors and thus the economical and societal impact of the Network will be wide-ranging. In turn, the digitalisation of the coatings manufacturing industry will also mean that the benefits of coatings on products are thoroughly recordable and accessible, as is needed to enable statistically robust knowledge of manufactured product lifetimes and performance. This is vital to enabling full life-cycle assessment of coated products and the sustainability implications of the coatings applied, contributing to the long-term aims of a resilient manufacturing.

Friction plays a central role in life; in transport, in manufacturing, in process engineering, in medical devices and in everyday human activities. Friction has commanded the attention of Amontons, Coulomb and Da Vinci and their simplistic, empirical laws have been the cornerstone of friction theory. At the conceptual and theoretical levels the vast modern day friction literature has revealed the enormous complexity of even the simplest processes and the limitations of the early friction laws. Friction is intimately linked to both adhesion, contact geometry and wear and all require an appreciation of the highly non-equilibrium and non-linear processes occurring over multiple length scales. The challenge presented is that friction in realistic engineering contacts cannot be predicted. Understanding the physical and chemical processes at contacting interfaces is the only route to cracking the tribological enigma. The research gap addressed in this Programme Grant is linked to the development of accurate experimental and numerical simulations of friction. We appreciate that the search for a unified model for friction prediction is futile because friction is system dependent. However, the goal to predict friction is achievable. We have identified 4 key areas where there are current challenges in understanding the origins of friction because of different complexities as outlined below: - Reactive surfaces; in many systems the frictional contact brings about chemical reactions that can only be described by non-equilibrium thermodynamics. We need accurate kinetic rate data for reactions which can only be provided by advanced in-situ chemical analysis - Extreme interfaces; these can be described as any interfaces that are inducing high strain rate material deformation and combined with electrochemical or chemical reactions. Simulation and sensing are key to improving the understanding. - Non-linear materials; in engineering and in biological systems we see the evolution of "soft" materials for tribological applications. Predicting friction in these systems relies on understanding the rheology/tribology interactions. - Particles and 2nd phase materials; for materials processing or for understanding the transport of wear particles in a contact we need to understand particle-particle friction in complex contact conditions where fracture/deformation are occurring.