Lunch Hour Lecture | From Waste to Wonder
In this lecture, Professor Mohan Edirisinghe will explore how pressure spinning is a fast, energy-efficient method for making tiny fibres and shapes from soft, often eco-friendly materials, and how recent improvements are making it more automated and factory-ready.
Lunch Hour Lecture | From Waste to Wonder
25 Nov 2025, 13:00 – 14:00
About the lecture:
From Waste to Wonder: Can Nature’s Leftovers Shape the Future of Green Manufacturing?
Pressure spinning, also known as pressurised gyration, is a simple and efficient way to create tiny fibres and structures from soft materials. Invented around ten years ago, this method spins materials inside a container using pressure and rotation, allowing for fast and low-energy production. By adjusting things like how fast materials flow and mixing different ingredients, it can make more complex shapes like tubes or layered fibres. Newer versions of this technique now use eco-friendly materials from plants and animals to produce useful items like films, ribbons, and fibres. Recent efforts have also focused on improving the equipment to make it more automated and suitable for factories, even using battery or solar power. The lecture will explore these advancements and compare this method to other ways of making similar materials.
UCL's popular public Lunch Hour Lecture series has been running at UCL since 1942, and showcases the exceptional research work being undertaken across UCL. Lectures are free and open to all and since 2020 have been held online.
About the Chair
Professor Sir Anthony Finkelstein
President at City St George's, University of London
Professor Sir Anthony Finkelstein KT CBE FRS FREng joined City St George's as the University’s President in June 2021. He joined City St George's from his position as the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser for National Security, which he had held since 2015. During that time, Finkelstein’s research was based at The Alan Turing Institute, and he held a Chair in Software Systems Engineering at University College London (UCL). Prior to this, he was Dean of the UCL Faculty of Engineering Sciences and Head of UCL Computer Science. His scientific work is in the broad area of systems engineering.
Professor Mohan Edirisinghe
Bonfield Chair of Biomaterials
UCL
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Further information
Ticketing
Ticketed and Pre-booking essential
Cost
Free
Open to
All
Availability
Yes
