Our core research and development strategy plays a key role in innovation, uncovering new opportunities, and fostering competitive advantage to help UK companies to build sustainable products and services. Here, we have shared a small selection of the most recent case studies, innovation impacts and opinion articles from our teams, issued in this past quarter.
The National Composite Centre (NCC), in partnership with the Augmented Reality for Enterprise Alliance (AREA) hosted an Immersive Design Collaboration event. Over 30 participants were able to experience various Immersive technologies focusing on using the technology to make a design change to an engineering part realised in a CAD 3D model.
Cecence, in collaboration with the National Composites Centre (NCC) and Gen 2 Carbon, have developed an airplane seatback that could reduce CO2 emissions by over 320 tonnes during the aircraft’s service life, paving the way for more environmentally friendly air travel.
The National Composites Centre (NCC) Bio-bolster project has identified alternative bio-based feedstock resins, with potential to enable more sustainable manufacture of wind turbine blades.
Working with Starling Cycles and Composite Braiding, the National Composites Centre (NCC) has proven that thermoplastic carbon fibre can be used to make an electric mountain bike frame, which means it can be repaired and recycled at end of life more easily.
Suilven RDE Ltd previously worked with the NCC under Project SALSA, to explore the environmental savings and impact on performance due to the use of natural fibre composites in their automotive body panels. Following this work and similar requests from Piper SV and Nedra, Suilven and the NCC wanted to take this a step further and assess composite material solutions that incorporate natural fibres and both bio-derived and biodegradable resin systems.
Suilven RDE Ltd, an automotive design SME, contacted the NCC for help in exploring the use of natural fibre composites in their car body panels. Project SALSA looked into the likely environmental savings that could be made, as well as impact on the performance of the car.
A key deliverable in the DETI project, delivered by the University of the West of England, Gary Atkinson, Associate Professor in Engineering at UWE Bristol and part of Lyndon Smith’s team in the Centre for Machine Vision, is developing the “Polarisation Vision for Composite Part Inspection” – a system to automatically detect defects in raw and processed composite materials and so reduce waste and huge expenses for composite industries.
Some of the West’s talented young engineers who are part of the Future Brunels programme, were able to redesign the SS Great Britain last week. The West in Minecraft’ is a session from the DETI SKills Inspire team that allows the students to use the hugely popular game Minecraft to re-engineer and re-design the West’s engineering landmarks. Including of course, Brunel’s famous ship.
UWE’s storytelling extraordinaire -Jane Carter – trained up 31 local scientists to make their selected STEM stereotype-busting books come alive for children. This training is the first step in a new scientist storytelling programme in schools – launched by the DETI Skills Inspire team at UWE Bristol, in collaboration with the West of England STEM Ambassador hub.
The Engineering workforce in the UK is made up of only 12% Women and 7% of people from BAME backgrounds – so no wonder the sector is experiencing an employee shortfall. The DETI Skills Innovate team at UWE Bristol wants to address the shortfall of engineers by finding how to best enable these underrepresented groups to enter and progress in the world of Engineering.
The British Science Week activity packs for 2022 have been launched, providing over 40 simple, hands-on science activities which teachers, parents and community group leaders can use with students and children during British Science Week this year. The WeCount for Net Zero Emissions pack was developed by the DETI Inspire team with funding from DETI.
A new round of peer mentoring and outreach project, Women Like Me, for 2022 has been announced. Women Like Me is a peer mentoring and outreach project, aimed at boosting female representation in engineering.
