New NRC research facility brings together public, private and academic partners to work on advanced materials

In November, the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) opened a new two-storey, 21,500-square-foot advanced materials research facility in Mississauga that will serve as a national clean energy hub. The facility is the NRC's first physical research presence in the Greater Toronto Area and will bring companies, government, and universities together for foundational research and tech transfer.

Part of the Canadian Campus for Advanced Materials Manufacturing (CCAMM), a joint initiative between the NRC and the Xerox Research Centre of Canada (XRCC) that seeks to act as a catalyst for the development, manufacturing, and commercialization of new advanced materials, the research facility will also house the operations and core R&D activities of the 7-year, $57-million Materials for Clean Fuels Challenge program.

"Our vision is for this collaborative hub to become the home to new technologies that will enable industry to be more sustainable," said Roger Scott-Douglas, COVID-19 Task Force secretary and formerly NRC's acting president, in a statement.

Prominent among the technologies for research at the NRC Mississauga research facility are AI-driven robotics experimental platforms termed “Material Acceleration Platforms” or self-driven labs. Among the areas of application emphasized by the researchers are materials enabling the conversion of carbon dioxide to fuels.

Among the university collaborations to take place at the facility are the NRC-University of Toronto Collaboration Centre for Green Energy Materials and the University of Waterloo's Multi-Scale Additive Manufacturing (MSAM) Lab. "We want to create in southwestern Ontario a unique ecosystem to support metal additive manufacturing (AM) in terms of research and development and to translate competencies to industry partners,” said Mihaela Vlasea, the associate director of MSAM, in a statement.

To support the collaboration with the University of Waterloo, the NRC awarded close to $2.6 million worth of equipment as part of the Advanced Manufacturing Supercluster Support program, led by the NRC’s Automotive and Surface Transportation Research Centre.

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