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.
The National Composites Centre (NCC) with industry guidance from Thales Alenia Space has manufactured an all-composites linerless (Type-V) tank demonstrator that is representative of those used for launch vehicle and satellite propellant tanks.
The National Composites Centre (NCC) selected INSPHERE to be a participant in the NCC Smart Factory Innovation Hub (SFIH) programme. Providing the company with access to its state-of-the art, secure 5G enabled virtual and physical test bed and sandpit environment, the NCC worked with Insphere to test its newly launched IONA System in the NCC’s Smart Factory Innovation Hub Test Bed which concentrates on the Automated Preforming Cell (APC).
Digital Catapult has partnered with the National Composites Centre (NCC) to drive innovation in the design and manufacturing of composites using Internet of Things (IoT) solutions, developing software that uses cutting-edge technology to calculate carbon footprint more accurately. This has culminated in a successful proof of concept for an application called the ‘eco-meter’ – which measures the carbon footprint of products manufactured by the NCC.
Chief Engineer Amit Visrolia, Digital Engineering at the NCC, unpacks the building blocks of digitisation in the industrial environment and reflects on the NCC's work in the DETI enabling capabilities programme - which is testing and proving emerging digital technologies for the good of industry.
Disruptive technologies offer the opportunity to accelerate innovation, providing us with new digital tools and processes to develop through-life product sustainability, and shorten product development time. Everything that we design and manufacture needs to be verified to prove that it conforms to the requirements and specifications that it was built for. Focused on demonstrating the use of Augmented Reality (AR) in an industrial verification process, an AR application has been developed and applied to show the benefits of immersive technologies.
As part of the Digital Engineering Technology & Innovation programme (DETI) collaboration with the 5G-Encode project, the National Composites Centre (NCC) has demonstrated a wireless 4G asset tracking solution. The system that has been setup can monitor the condition and location of time-sensitive composite materials to improve quality metrics of Automatic Fibre Placement (AFP) manufacturing processes and operations productivity.
