Materials Processing Institute

Abstract

The Materials Processing Institute (MPI) is a not-for-profit research and technology organisation that is being formed as a result of a divestment from Tata Steel. The Institute includes all of the people and facilities that were formerly part of the Tata Steel research centre at Teesside Technology Centre in the UK. Tata Steel is gifting all of the assets at Teesside Technology Centre to MPI, which will then be completely independent of Tata Steel. As a result of this divestment MPI is now applying its expertise in technology commercialisation across a broader range of industry and its open access facilities are available for the benefit of companies across the globe. Though MPI itself is a fairly new company, 2015 will mark the seventieth anniversary of continuous research and development through MPI and its predecessors. The forerunner to MPI was the British Iron and Steel Research Association (BISRA), founded in 1945 as a not-forprofit research organisation. Over the ensuing decades BISRA was first nationalised into the British Steel Corporation, privatised as British Steel Plc, merged into Corus Group Plc and then acquired by Tata Steel Ltd. Throughout all of this time, the centre at Teesside continued to be at the forefront of technology development for the Iron and Steel industry, commercialising technologies such as blast furnace coal injection, steel converter bath agitation and mould thermal monitoring for continuous casting. Now the cycle has completed a full circle with the creation of MPI as a not-for-profit, independent research organisation, continuing its work as a process development centre, for the steel and other industries and no longer tied to a single company (see Fig 1). At the heart of MPI is the industrial development and technology commercialisation expertise, which takes bench top ideas and makes them successful in a production environment, supports the development of new grades of steel and designs improvements to steel processes. Tata Steel will remain as a significant customer to MPI, with a long term research agreement, but the Institute is also partnering with other companies in the industry and has received significant support in these early stages from Harsco Metals and the Centre for Process Innovation. MPI is now working with suppliers of equipment and materials to the steel industry, steel producing companies and users of steel, on technology and supply chain problems. It is increasingly recognised that the UK is an excellent location in which to undertake academic and industrial research. Access to world leading universities, tax breaks such as the UK R&D tax credits and a well established intellectual property framework, that includes Patent Box, means that companies can rapidly develop solutions to technical problems and