About the lecture:
From Waste to Wonder: Can Nature’s Leftovers Shape the Future of Green Manufacturing?
Pressure spinning, also known as pressurised gyration, is a simple and efficient way to create tiny fibres and structures from soft materials. Invented around ten years ago, this method spins materials inside a container using pressure and rotation, allowing for fast and low-energy production. By adjusting things like how fast materials flow and mixing different ingredients, it can make more complex shapes like tubes or layered fibres. Newer versions of this technique now use eco-friendly materials from plants and animals to produce useful items like films, ribbons, and fibres. Recent efforts have also focused on improving the equipment to make it more automated and suitable for factories, even using battery or solar power. The lecture will explore these advancements and compare this method to other ways of making similar materials.
About the speaker:
Professor Mohan Edirisinghe OBE, FREng holds the Bonfield Chair of Biomaterials in the Mechanical Engineering Department at University College London. A Fellow of The European Academy of Science, he has published 600 journal papers and has supervised 250 researchers including 100 PhD graduations (over 50 of these at UCL) and he has been awarded grants to the value of £25 million, including 43 UKRI grants. He has won over a dozen medals, awards and prizes for his research and in 2023-24 he was awarded The Royal Academy of Engineering Colin Campbell Mitchell Prize for his world-leading contribution to the industrial application of polymeric fibres by inventing novel fibre manufacturing vessels and processes, and The Royal Society Clifford Paterson Medal & Lecture Prize for his seminal research in engineering science of making small structures from soft matter in novel scalable ways, creating new frontiers in functional applications causing major advances in manufacturing and healthcare.
About the chair:
Professor Sir Anthony Finkelstein joined City St George's as the University’s President in June 2021. He joined City St George's from his position as the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser for National Security, which he had held since 2015. During that time, Finkelstein’s research was based at The Alan Turing Institute, and he held a Chair in Software Systems Engineering at University College London (UCL). Prior to this, he was Dean of the UCL Faculty of Engineering Sciences and Head of UCL Computer Science. His scientific work is in the broad area of systems engineering.
