Immersive Technology Gives a New Perspective to Opportunities in Advanced Ceramics at The AMRICC Centre
Wednesday, 3 December 2025
New state-of-the-art technology has been developed to offer a digital window to the world of opportunities at The AMRICC Centre, giving visitors from across the globe the inside track on its capabilities at the touch of a button.
Since its launch in 2024, the Staffordshire-based facility has emerged as a global powerhouse, supporting cutting edge research, development and innovation in the multi-billion pound advanced ceramics sector by providing a critical pathway from lab-scale innovation to market-ready solutions.
Now, to showcase its unique capabilities to sectors including space, energy, healthcare, nuclear, and aerospace, the centre has invested in a new app to enable viewers to take a deep dive into the operations at the site.
Dr Cathryn Hickey, Chief Executive of AMRICC, said: “The AMRICC Centre is the UK’s centre of Excellence for the development of Advanced Ceramic Technologies. “Its cutting edge equipment provides a combination of extreme processing capabilities rarely available elsewhere. “The technology enables companies across the advanced manufacturing sectors to develop and bring new ceramic technologies to market. “We receive a great deal of interest in its capabilities and we wanted to provide a dynamic and interesting way to really showcase the range that is available, notably all in one place. “To achieve that, we felt that a purpose-built app offered the best way to get the message across and communicate technical information in a dynamic and detailed way.”
The AMRICC Centre, hosted and managed by Lucideon, stands as the physical outcome from the Midlands Industrial Ceramics Group’s (MICG) £18.27 million research programme, funded by Government under UK Research and Innovation’s flagship Strength in Places Fund (SIPF).
High-value ceramics processing equipment on site, supported by the expertise of material scientists and engineers, is available as an open-to-all facility, to improve access to scale-up equipment and enable product and process development to be carried out at an industrially relevant scale.
Richard Goodhead, Lucideon’s Chief Marketing Officer, has led the development of the new app. He said: “The brief was to create an innovative platform, that demonstrates the scale and capability of The AMRICC Centre and provides an immersive user experience for viewers. “The sheer volume of opportunity at the facility makes it a challenge to communicate, so we felt a purpose-built app was the best option for our national and international audiences. “It’s hugely rewarding to see this technology bring The AMRICC Centre to life on screen, and provide an exciting chapter in its ongoing development. “We’ve already had great feedback from users, and are now preparing for the second-stage of delivery, which will see the app utilised as a key feature in training and skills development. “For that we will be drawing on its capability to incorporate AR and VR technology to create a fully immersive training programme for The AMRICC Academy, which launched earlier this year to provide training and development programmes in both traditional and advanced ceramics.”
The AMRICC Centre Virtual Tour app is available for download on iPads and tablets from both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
The AMRICC Centre is the UK’s only advanced ceramics pilot-scale facility, providing the ability to rapidly solve materials development and production challenges, and thus accelerate products to market. Its critical mass, its breadth and depth of ceramic processing equipment, and its technologies, allow it to provide a unique resource for industry. It is hosted and managed by Lucideon on behalf of the MICG consortium, in close collaboration with industry & academia, and was jointly funded by the UKRI Strength in Places Fund (SIPF) and Lucideon to deliver the benefits of the Midlands Advanced Ceramics for industry 4.0 project in an open-access facility for all.
The AMRICC Centre serves as a Centre of Excellence for the development of advanced ceramic technologies. It combines capabilities from powder processing, forming, sintering, and testing, all the way through the manufacturing process – notably all in one place.
The cutting-edge equipment suite provides capabilities that are rarely available elsewhere, and covers a range of extreme conditions, from densification with hot or cold isostatic pressure, to sintering up to 3000 degrees, sintering in a vacuum, or in atmospheres such as argon.
The Centre covers conventional and non-conventional manufacturing methods, such as additive manufacturing, and also both conventional and novel sintering techniques, with all of this supported by a suite of testing and analytics capability, all at greater-than-lab scale.
The Centre allows users to change or develop a new manufacturing process with industrially relevant facilities outside of your current production line. By using the extensive capacity and capability within The AMRICC Centre, products can be developed offline, isolating all the independent variables in parallel to existing operations. There’s no loss of current production, reducing the risk and cost of the process, whilst allowing time and expertise to investigate all aspects of a new production process.
The AMRICC Centre offers more than just equipment. Threaded through its development work is expertise in computational modelling and data science, along with digital twinning, computational materials development, and other future-facing Industry 4.0 practices.
Access to The AMRICC Centre and its entire range of cutting-edge kit capabilities is open to all on a pay-as-you-go basis, but for those interested in more frequent collaboration, membership is available and offers additional benefits. Regardless of model, users can either use the open access facilities privately, or add in the superb skills, abilities, and many years of experience of Lucideon’s technical experts who then provide the expertise and the consultancy to find solutions to their root-cause problems.
Press release written by Jane Shepherd, Shepherd PR, 07985 129315
www.shepherd-pr.com