VIDEO | Details of £60m Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre

The University of Manchester has released a CGI fly-through video of how the £60m Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre, designed by Rafael Vinoly Architects, will look once it is built at the University’s North campus.

The 90,500 sq ft block on the site of the Faraday Building was granted planning permission by Manchester City Council last week.

The virtual tour of the building shows its location on the North campus of the University of Manchester, next to the Mancunian Way and Sackville Street. It also shows laboratories and offices on each floor.

The GEIC will be one of several buildings in Manchester dedicated to graphene and 2D material research, alongside the £61m National Graphene Institute, which opened earlier this year, and the £235m Sir Henry Royce Institute for Materials Research & Innovation, set to be built within the University of Manchester’s Oxford Road campus.

Whereas the NGI features academic-led research in partnership with industry, the GEIC will be industry-led, working with academia and focusing on innovation and applications. It will initially focus on a number of the University’s graphene application areas; energy, composites, formulations and coatings, electronics and membranes.

The scheme is set to complete by the end of 2017.

The GEIC will be partially funded by £15m from the Higher Education Funding Council England’s UK Research Partnership Investment Fund, £5m from Innovate UK and £30m from Masdar; the Abu Dhabi-based renewable energy company owned by Mubadala. The remaining £10m will be provided by other research funds and institutions.

James Baker, Graphene business director, said: “It is exciting to see inside the GEIC for the first time and see a glimpse of the world-class facilities that will be built.

“We have worked closely with a number of industry partners and other institutions to ensure that this will form a crucial centre for scaling up production of graphene applications and taking them to the market.

“Already we are seeing a number of existing partnerships in the NGI start to develop some exciting graphene enabled concepts and applications and we will see this world-class research mature into the next phase of commercialisation in the GEIC and then support the development of a UK supply-chain for graphene products and applications.”