Professor Steve Beaumont, vice principal Research & Enterprise can well claim “a significant” portfolio in University nano, with some 80 talented staff, an extensive range (physics, chemistry, engineering, bio & IT) considerable grant work together with a brilliantly collection of successful case studies.

But he is well aware that the technology cannot just rest on these laurels, and must have a ’broader front of development’ if its major advantages, improved functionality and cost saving, are to be realised. And Glasgow might even find some new customers if it takes its skilled and engineering approach into new sectors.

Accordingly First Step Awards are offered by the University’s Innovation Network. Applications can be made by either SME or academic and funding used to buy academic time spent on a project.

In the introductions made by industrial participants, Carol Scullion of Synaptech Consultants highlighted and made her plea for one sector, largely ignored in Scotland’s nano fields, namely the textile industry for which nano can offer so much in fibre enhancements for durability, visibility, and multi-functionality, as well as coatings for sensor use, light, colour virus shields and such.

But alas no-one made such a case for the ‘wet nano’ approach so dubbed by Netherland’s Wageningen expert, Frans Kampers and nano’s very real and practical use within the food and drink industries either, where it is rapidly becomes an expertise in Europe, but is not apparently courted at home.

Nano developments were early driven by both the bio and sectors. Professor Ian Phillips, (left) principal staff engineer of ARM Ltd, made the awesome statement that ARM, the architect of much of our digital world and specialist in embedded microprocessor technology IP, “doesn’t make anything.”

But from 12 engineers in Cambridge with no revenue and no patents, it now has 1,800 people world-wide, $500m profit before tax in 2008 and a 32% increase in sales thanks to IP partnerships. “New technology” he warned “increases cost and risk and does not always increase value.”

Semiconductors
Yet Professor Phillips is nano alert, and a staunch adherent of one of Glasgow’s pre-eminent nano men, the ‘decanano’ Professor Asen Asenov, (right) who heads the Device Modelling Group (DMG). He deals not in nano’s huge definition at the 100nm but rather in the ‘tens’ of nano. In brief at 45nm the semiconductor was in trouble with statistical variability technology, which existing TCAD simulations tools were not been able to optimise.

DMG has long term been developing a suite of high performance tools for this, addressing not only for 45nm but down into the reaches of 32nm, 22 nm and even 16nm.

The University with the support of Scottish Enterprise is in the process of creating a spin-out venture that will deliver services and develop stand-alone software toolkits based on Professor Asenov’s TMG developed TCAD tools.

Bio and designed interfaces
Tissue engineered bone grafting using biomimetics and nano templates has Dr Matt Dalby as it hero, together with Dr Gadegaard’s expertise in the lithography behind nano-patterning templates, now growing into an extensive library for ‘bottom-up’ direct stem cell growth and behaviour, where Dr Mathis Riehle works on cellular reaction to interfaces and is developing a microfluidic device to test the toxicity of nanoparticles on lung cells. (Left: A mesenchymal stem cell stain for actin (red) and tubulin (green) cytoskeletons cultured on 10nm high nano-islands)

Opto and Terahertz approaches
Quantum ghost image finder, Professor Miles Padgett (who proposes future aberration correction for microscope development) has put his own spin onto the well known optical tweezers by turning them into force-feeling spanners, as well as working on optics for gas detection.

Terahertz matters are Professor David Cummings preoccupation and working with e2v had a new planar Gunn diode (right) running at 120GHz in the lab and likely to emerge in handheld technology.

Energy & batteries
One of the neatest nano approaches is that of red mud and methane generation, of chemist Dr Hargreaves (now high into current fashion as an Indian project) where work on aluminium waste red mud (70m tones yearly world-wide) exhibits significant hydrogen production. Thanks to iron and iron carbide, the material offers magnetic behaviour to facilitate downstream separation and processing for a pre-treatment system for water and gas, allowing two waste products to be transformed into two valuable end products.

Professor Ducan Gregory is working on lithium doped with transition materials to charge/discharge more quickly improving cycling time with implications for battery longevity. In a typical Glaswegian under statement “We’re quite hopeful of the potential,” he says.

Quantum wells & dots
Taking the quantum approach (quantum wells are now well known as the IP behind the spinout of Intense Ltd with its recent US acquisition High Power Devices of New Jersey) Professor Colin Stanley’s team working with Instituto de Energía Solar at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain, have developed new type of photovoltaic cell based on InAs quantum dots grown by molecular beam epitaxy and embedded in (Al,Ga)As. Known as Intermediate Band Solar Cells (IBSC) the work has produced cells (Right: 2x2mm solar cell mounted and bonded to a heat sink) with one sun efficiencies in excess of 20% and also two patents.

NanoYard is a fantastic, if rather over-modest-about-itself facility. It offers its expertise not just to the shipyard Glasgow-based familiars, but to those as far a-field as ARM in Cambridge and the Solar institute of Madrid and so one might even suggest could also assist Aberdeen or Edinburgh based companies.

If Scottish companies fail to make use of this a pantechnicon of skills and facilities not to mention the funding to help improve their products and processes, they may yet rue the day.