Manufacturing Systems and Technology (MST)

The MST programme is a comprehensive education and research effort that concentrates on enabling manufacturing systems and technologies for emerging industries. We define emerging industries as those based on new technologies that are just beginning to be considered for commercialisation. Currently, this includes a host of new concepts in micro-and nano-technology such as molecular diagnosis, advanced drug screening, new ideas for photonic devices, micro-robots, nano-scale optical devices and a multitude of potential products employing micro-and nano-scale fluidics. At the commercial manufacturing-level, these industries will be characterised by micron-scale product dimensions, high value-added, extreme quality requirements, mass customisation, time sensitive distribution and entirely new business structures. Currently at hand, our research will focus on an emerging industry that is now at the point of large-scale commercialisation, namely: microfluidic devices for chemical, biomedical and photonic applications.

While specific in nature, we also believe that the manufacturing issues for this emerging industry will have manufacturing process, systems and business issues that are common with many other industries which have yet to emerge - such as fluidic devices computation, advanced drug delivery systems and advanced health maintenance systems. Our research themes focus on critical issues enabling high volume, low cost, high quality products in these industries. In addition, as commercial viability is a key issue, it is necessary to address the business economics of the new operations in these emerging systems. In MST, these topics are treated as an integrated set, sharing common performance metrics such as cost, quality, rate and flexibility in all aspects of the system.

For the MST programme, there are three inter-related components:

• An Educational Programme comprising a Dual Master’s degree, and a Ph.D. degree

• An Inter-university Research Programme (IURP) on critical system-level problems with these emerging industries

• A Flagship Research Programme (FRP) on critical manufacturing process issues for commercial scale production of microfluidic devices for biomedical applications.