This is a 5 year, £4.2M research programme funded by EPSRC. It started on the 1st February 2013 and is led by Prof Jon Binner at University of Birmingham with the other partners being Profs Bill Lee and Mike Finnis at Imperial College London and Prof Mike Reece at Queen Mary London.

The vision is to develop the required understanding of how the processing, microstructures and properties of materials systems operating in extreme environments interact to the point where materials with the required performance can be designed and then manufactured.

The overall research objective is to establish in the UK the capability to discover and understand new materials that can operate under increasingly extreme conditions, thus enabling a wide range of new technologies. The research will focus primarily but not exclusively on metal-boride-carbide-nitride compounds and their composites.

http://www.xmat.ac.uk/