Its mission statement is to push the boundaries in materials science to discover, design, scale and manufacture sustainable, cutting-edge glass products for a range of uses, including automotive, architectural and touch screens for consumer electronics.
The company enlisted the world-leading academic expertise at the University of Liverpool’s Materials Innovation Factory – which houses leading- edge digital innovation capabilities and the Hartree Centre’s supercomputing facilities – to collaboratively accelerate the discovery of a new generation of potential transparent conductive materials and thereby maintain a globally-leading competitive edge into the future.
The challenge
Product developments in glass needs to keep pace with the demands of a variety of new market applications. High performance solar, thermal and conductive properties are prized in the latest generation of vehicles and building design for example.
Once a potentially viable material has been identified, an enormous variety of tests are carried out at NSG’s European Technical Centre, Lathom to ensure it can stand up to the most extreme conditions, and meet regulatory requirements and demanding specifications. These include weatherability, mechanical and chemical durability, as well as optical properties which simulate a variety of functional applications in various locations.
Before this stage, however, researchers, engineers and product design specialists need to ascertain what physical specifications the glass will require. Traditionally, research in this field of materials chemistry has been labour and time intensive with multiple iterative processes to obtain the right materials for specific applications.
The solution
Academics and industry experts from the Materials Innovation Factory combined software engineering and materials science to de-risk and expedite the R&D process for discovery of new custom materials.
Using high throughput computing they are analysing huge data sets and mapping the structural and compositional characteristics of potential materials. Thousands of formulas will be analysed across a range of properties, including shape, size, conductivity and reflectivity. The speed, efficiency and precision of this method will enable Pilkington Technology Management Ltd (PTML) (NSG Group) to develop new high-performance, transparent conducting materials which will greatly compress the time an analogue approach would have taken.
Benefits
In addition to enabling the discovery of potential transparent conductors the project acted as a catalyst for wider adoption of high-performance computing, digital innovation and use of digital tools within NSG leading to recent feasibility projects involving manufacturing processes with the University’s Engineering department. The group now has recognised the value of this approach globally.
It has continued to collaborate with the team at the Materials Innovation Facility, with a number of new PhD students exploring materials synthesis, thin film deposition and identifying other leading-edge functional materials – a key and emerging area in innovative coatings for next-generation glass coatings.
Dr Su Varma, Academic Director of the NSG Group R&D Incubator described how the successful collaboration had arisen following a global search for the world-leading academics in the field. He said that the successful project: “represents a commitment from NSG to exploit digital methodologies to drive and expedite materials research in new product development.”
Back to: Digital innovation with the University of Liverpool