Innovate UK Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTPs) connect businesses with academic expertise to turn innovative ideas into real-world impact. Every KTP is a collaboration between a postgraduate researcher (the Associate), a business, and a university (Knowledge Base; this involves the principal investigators and business development team).

The KTP between Queen Mary University of London and Archipelago Technology Group Ltd has been awarded the highest possible “Outstanding” rating and a Certificate of Excellence from Innovate UK. With only around 10% of KTP projects achieving this grade, the award reflects the strength of the team and the significant impact on both innovation and industry that the work produced.

Archipelago is a deep-tech company based in Cambridge, UK. Its core technology, Powerdrop™, is a non-contact coating system capable of producing pinhole-free barrier layers. A key application is the coating of paper-based materials to replace plastic packaging at scale, with the potential to significantly reduce global plastic waste.

Archipelago’s collaboration with Queen Mary eventually grew to the first KTP. The project brought together teams from Archipelago, Queen Mary, and University College London (UCL) to advance the Powerdrop™ non-contact coating technology. The work enhanced the understanding of the system’s end-to-end coating process. It allowed overcoming the speed limitations, improved the performance of the system, and enabled it to handle a wider range of high-viscosity materials. It also supports more sustainable manufacturing approaches, including potential reductions in plastic use in packaging.

The project was led by two KTP Associates: Lekshmi Bindhu Sunilkumar, a physicist who completed her PhD at the National Institute of Technology Calicut, India, and Faisal Manzoor, holding a PhD in Materials Engineering, Ulster University. Both of them have since started promising careers: Faisal is now a lecturer at Ulster, and Lekshmi is an inkjet scientist at Dandy.

Lekshmi and Faisal have been supervised simultaneously by the academic team from Queen Mary and the business team from Archipelago. The academic team consisted of Radomir Slavchov (supervisor) and Rafa Castrejon-Pita (academic lead, formerly Queen Mary, now UCL). Their internationally recognised expertise in surface science, capillarity, fluid dynamics, inkjet systems, microfluidics, and high-speed imaging was central to the project’s success. The Archipelago team included the business supervisor, Jane List, and was led by Guy Newcombe (CEO) and Dan Mace.

Working closely with the project team, Lekshmi and Faisal applied high-speed photography, surface science knowledge, and rigorous experimental methods to develop reliable pinhole-free coatings for a wide range of cellulose-based containers. The resulting materials were judged “best in class” by leading international brand owners.

Building on this success, Queen Mary has recently secured a second KTP with Archipelago Group, enabling the partnership to further advance the Powerdrop™ process and accelerate the development of sustainable coating technologies for industry. The focus of the new project is on how to make a porous cellulose-based material impermeable to water, oil, and air by coating it without it losing its recyclability.

This work was supported by the Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTP) programme, funded by Innovate UK and Archipelago Technology Group Ltd (Grant No. 10019184).