Manufacturing industry is the most important source of economic growth in a region or a country. On the other hand, the industry also played a key role in environmental pollution. Countries around the world are now trying hard to find a balance between these two contradicting fronts. The wealthiest countries in the world today are built upon a strong manufacturing industry. In order to keep their leadership in manufacturing, Germany launched “Industrie 4.0” in 2011, UK launched “Catapult” in 2011, China launched “Made in China 2025” in 2015, and USA launched the “Strategy for American leadership in Advanced Manufacturing” in 2018. All these programmes demonstrated the strategic importance of advanced manufacturing at the national level. Locally, the HK Government established the HK$2 billion Re-industrialization funding scheme since 2018 and allocated another HK$2 billion for the advanced manufacturing sector to promote the advanced manufacturing industry.
PolyU is well recognized having the strongest team in advanced manufacturing in HK. The academic departments of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, State Key Laboratory in Precision Engineering, Industrial Centre, University Research Facility in 3D printing as well as the branded Aviation Services Research Centre are cradles to carry out research in advanced manufacturing.
The Research Institute for Advanced Manufacturing (RIAM) has been established by the university to carry out interdisciplinary research in the areas related to advanced manufacturing. Our aim is to create a world class hub for global research and knowledge transfer in advanced manufacturing in order to drive the economic growth in a sustainable environment in Hong Kong, the Greater Bay Area, the Nation and the world.
RIAM will have the different groups addressing the following key aspects of advanced manufacturing:
1/ Advanced Processing and materials technologies
2/ Carbon Neutral manufacturing
3/ Digital Manufacturing
4/ Manufacturing systems and instrumentation
5/ Manufacturing Operations and Logistics
6/ Policies, Strategies and value chains analysis
We appreciate that without in-depth industrial collaboration, we will never be able to move our research results beyond Technology Readiness Level 6. With this, we earnestly invite industry leaders to partner with us in order to advance and enhance our manufacturing industry for the benefits of a sustainable society and environment.
