Sheffield Hallam receives £1m tool to help eye transplant patients

Tool can be used to create ultra thin materials for corneal eye-transplants as well as for more responsive smart screens

Sheffield Hallam University has taken delivery of engineering equipment worth £1million that develops ultra thin coatings to be used on corneal eye transplants or during spinal-cord surgery.

The university's Materials and Engineering Research Institute (MERI) has now installed the high power impulse magnetron (HIPIMS) cluster tool. The cluster-type coater for physical vapour deposition (PVD) is an advanced coating technology which is able to deposit thin films onto materials with extremely high density.

This includes corneal eye transplants, which it can cover with a thin layer of electrical-conductive film to enable it to transmit information to the brain, which the University said leads to better results for transplant recipients. There are 3,600 corneal transplants in the UK each year.

The films can serve as invisible layers, which can be applied to surfaces to reduce glare, make them self-cleaning, and keep them free of bacteria. They can also be used as contacts between microelectronic chip components in the next generation of electronics. In addition, coatings can act as conductors to enable touch screens and photovoltaic cells to operate with more responsive screens.

Professor Arutiun Ehiasarian, head of the Thin Films Research Centre at Hallam, said: "The technology employed by this equipment means that the coatings produced perform much better than conventional pulsed sputtering. We are also able to explore new areas, such as working with eye-transplants to ensure they can transmit to the brain - which is an exciting new field for us to work in and a potentially very important one.

"We now have a machine that is unique in its ability to operate an extremely stable process which allows HIPIMS technology to compete for the first time against state of the art PVD processes in the fields of high precision applications."

Sheffield Hallam worked with colleagues at Trumpf Huettinger Poland and Von Ardenne Anlagen Technik in Dresden to build this equipment in Germany, before dismantling it and transporting it to Hallam and reassembling it.