The quest for energy means that the world’s oil and gas industries are working in increasingly challenging environments, operating at unprecedented depths, pressures and temperatures. The new technologies required for operating in these environments with optimum safety and efficiency depend on the development of specialist materials for refineries, processing plants and pipelines.
In order to drive developments in advanced materials, energy giant BP is establishing a $100 million international research centre with the University of Manchester at its hub and the University of Cambridge as one of three further partners contributing to the research programme. The ten-year investment programme, known as the BP Centre for Advanced Materials (BP-ICAM), is expected to support a total of 25 new academic posts along with 100 post-graduate researchers and 80 post-doctoral fellows.
The other research partners in BP-ICAM’s ‘hub and spoke’ structure are Imperial College London and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The four institutions will focus, both collaboratively and individually, on a range of research areas over the next ten years.
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Image: A materials scientist at work - Credit: Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy, University of Cambridge
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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