Professor David Harrison

Professor David Harrison has a BSc in Engineering Science and a PhD in Robotics. He holds a Chair in Design in the School of Engineering and Design. He is a Chartered Engineer with research interests in sustainable design and printed electronics.

Over the past decade he has lead a number of research projects inspired by the goals of environmentally sensitive design. These projects include the application of offset lithographic printing to the manufacture of electronics. New manufacturing processes arising from this project have been successfully patented and licensed. He has also worked on the development of the concept of "Active Disassembly", where by features are designed into products to permit them to disassemble at end of product life, facilitating recycling. Other projects supervised include work on ecological foot printing of products, eco innovation, and tools to calculate ecologically optimum product lifetimes.

Professor Harrison founded the Cleaner Electronics Research Group in 1994. Their work on renewable energy has included projects on the design of daylight capture systems, regenerative energy storage systems based on hydrogen fuel cells, and the design of low cost thermoelectric devices.

Main Interests:

Sustainable design and active disassembly
Printed Electronics - Lithographic printing and manufacturing of electronics

Ongoing Work:

A patent knowledge base which enables comparison of an emerging design to existing patents thereby enabling early identification of potential conflict prior art. (Working with Prof Mark Atherton and research team).
A manufacturing process for an energy storage device using 3D printing of Supercapacitors. (Working with Dr Yanmeng Xu and research team)
Supporting sustainable Product –Service System (PSS) Implementation through distributed manufacturing (Working with Dr Fabrizio Ceschin and research team )
A robotic and autonomous system that services the fluids on passenger rail vehicles. (Working with Prof Mark Atherton and research team)