Prof. Malcolm Smyth (BEST Centre and School of Chemical Sciences) and Dr. Greg Hughes (School of Physical Sciences) have just been awarded a grant of £20K under the Applied Research Grants Scheme (administered by Enterprise Ireland) for a 2-year project entitled “A Combined XPS and Electrochemical Investigation of the Redox-based Cure Chemistry of Industrial Sealants”. Half of this funding has been provided by Loctite (Ireland) Ltd., which is now part of the Henkel group. This latest grant brings the total of research funding on joint projects between DCU and Loctite to over £100K since 1985. Since then, eight postgraduate students in Prof. Smyth’s group have carried out all or part of their research on the chemistry and analysis of industrial sealants. These include Dr. Mary Meaney (now Assistant Registrar at DCU) and Dr. Declan Raftery (Director, BEST Centre). In addition, over 10 publications on this research programme have been published in international journals such as the International Journal of Adhesion and Adhesives.

On a recent visit to the Corporate Headquarters of Loctite in the USA, Dr. Ray Leonard (who has been the main scientist at Loctite involved on these projects, and is also an Adjunct Faculty member in the School of Chemical Sciences) gave a presentation on the research work carried out at DCU to their Scientific Advisory Board. The Scientific Advisory Board is composed of a group of professors drawn from a number of prestigious American Universities including Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of California at Berkeley, University of Cincinnati and the University of Massachusetts. Their comments ranged from "the electrochemical investigations were particularly illuminating" to "this work has extended the knowledge base in this area well beyond what was known previously". In another comment, it was stated that “the use of these model systems is certainly good from a research standpoint, but the underlying problem, variations in cure speed due to variations in substrate surface chemistry, will still have to be dealt with eventually”.
 

Prof. Malcolm Smyth (left) and Dr. Ray Leonard (Loctite (Ireland) Ltd.) outside the new Chemistry/Biotechnology building at DCU.

This new interdisciplinary project aims to do just that, by bringing together Prof. Smyth’s expertise in electrochemistry with Dr. Hughes’s expertise in surface science. Loctite have also been heavily involved with DCU through the INTRA programme, and have contributed to the purchase of both a mass spectrometer system in the School of Chemical Sciences, and to the XPS system in the School of Physical Sciences. They also sponsor the Loctite medal for the top student graduating every year from the Masters course in Instrumental Analysis.