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Department of Chemical Engineering

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Knowledge exchange

Your business can benefit from sponsoring a research student or project, or through a knowledge transfer project - find out how.

The Department of Chemical Engineering has strong relationships with companies around the world, and we are open to building more.

Both sponsorship and knowledge transfer methods attract public funding - helping to keep your costs down - and around half of the Department's research is funded by the government and through grants awarded by research councils such as the EPSRC and BBSRC. Other funding arrives directly from companies to finance specific collaborative research projects.

Learn more about your options below.

CASE projects

CASE projects (Cooperative Awards in Science and Engineering) are funded largely by the UK's Research Councils and administered by universities. These doctoral research studentship projects are created and supervised by the university and company together. Projects are more commercially-driven and market-oriented than typical doctoral research.

  • CASE awards enable you to sponsor a postgraduate research project. This supports a graduate researcher, with the input of an academic supervisor, to work on a research project relevant to your business. Only the best graduates are selected to pursue postgraduate research, and joint supervision by your company and the university will ensure their work remains on the right track. CASE awards provide companies with a cost-effective way of solving industrial research problems and promote collaboration between industry and higher education institutions. If minimising cost is more important to you than obtaining fast results, this could be of great benefit to you.
  • Industrial CASE awards are allocated directly to the industrial partner and the company can devise its own research project for the student, provided it meets the requirements of the Research Council involved and the academic needs of the student.

Knowledge Transfer Partnerships

Businesses and academics participate in a wide variety of technology-focused knowledge transfer projects. The Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) programme enables you to source university expertise that is of value to your business in developing new products, services or processes.

Knowledge Transfer Partnerships are designed to help you access this expertise and bring it into your business by working in partnership with academics or researchers. Project costs are mostly funded by Innovate UK so the cost-effectiveness of accessing academic expertise and employing a good graduate is very attractive.

Faraday Partnerships

A Faraday Partnership is an alliance of organisations and institutions that receive government funding, and is dedicated to the improvement of the competitiveness of UK industry through the research, development, transfer and exploitation of new and improved science and technology. One of the aims of Faraday Partnerships is to provide more effective and coherent uptake of the various funding support mechanisms available.

Joining a Faraday Partnership that is relevant to you will enable you to influence the research and development agenda at a national level. Our Department is involved in several Faraday Partnerships.

Other government funding

Other government funding initiatives are available to help small businesses fund research, such as Smart Scheme grants and the Enterprise Fund. Our Research Facilitator can provide you with advice on obtaining such supplementary funding for your research projects.

Engineering doctorate programme

The engineering doctorate programme enables EPSRC and a collaborating company to sponsor a postgraduate student (known as a research engineer) to work on an innovative project that will make a significant contribution to the work of the company. Projects are designed and supervised jointly by university academics and the industrial partner, and the majority of work is undertaken in the company.

Sponsoring a proof of concept project

If you are looking at undertaking a small project on a speculative basis, you could consider sponsoring an MSc or MEng project that would be undertaken by a student under the supervision of a member of academic staff.