Manufacturing

The Manufacturing Challenge Area focuses on activities related to manufacturing of metamaterials, particularly with a view to scale-up of activities from lab to factory. We are interested in manufacturing of metamaterials with any end-use application and across all feature and product length scales.

We are committed to supporting more effective transfer of knowledge from metamaterials researchers to industrial manufacturing, and to drawing in new manufacturing-focused academics and industrialists into the metamaterials community.

As our activities are so closely related to the interests of the SIGs, we will work in close collaboration with all the SIGs to promote the discussion of manufacturing related issues of metamaterial designs from an early stage in their development.

In this way we will strengthen the ability of metamaterials designers to realise the structures required and provide new opportunities for manufacturing metamaterial products for manufacturing specialists.

Manufacturing & Scale-up Roadmap

Pending publication.

Over the past decades, significant advancements in manufacturing techniques have enabled the realisation of various types of metamaterials, ranging from conventional methods such as subtractive and formative manufacturing to disruptive approaches like additive manufacturing. This roadmap explores the current-state-of-the art manufacturing techniques for metamaterials, highlighting key challenges and opportunities in scaling up production and commercialisation. Structured around three metamaterial categories – mechanical, electromagnetic and acoustic – and three manufacturing approaches –additive, subtractive and formative – this roadmap presents insights from leading experts on the future of metamaterial fabrication, offering perspectives on overcoming barriers to large-scale implementation.