EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Through-life Engineering Services

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The EPSRC Centre in Coupled Whole Systems is a National Centre, hosted by Cranfield and Durham Universities. Successful high technology UK manufacturing companies are offering a range of interlinked high value products and services. High value products are typically technology intensive, expensive and reliability critical requiring engineering services (e.g. maintenance, repair and overhaul) throughout the life cycle e.g. aircraft engine, high-end cars, railway vehicle, wind turbines and defence equipment. Competitiveness is then dependent on many factors, such as design innovation for the product and added value through the services and minimisation of whole life cost. These products typically combine five major domains (structural, mechanical, electrical, electronic and software sub-systems) to achieve the required functionality and performance. These products are referred to as Coupled Whole Systems. The overall vision of the proposed EPSRC Centre is to develop knowledge, technology and process demonstrators, novel methodologies, techniques and the associated toolsets to provide the capability for the concept design of the coupled whole system based on system design for engineering services.After discussions with the industrial partners, KTNs and all the academics involved in the Centre, it has been decided that the Centre will start with a set of five projects. The projects are of three types, the first one identifies current challenges in the systems design across multiple sectors, the second set of three projects is in TRL levels 2-3 and addresses three major industrial challenges for engineering services across the sectors. This research will develop technology and process demonstrators, design rules and standards to evaluate the system design in order to reduce the engineering services cost later in the life cycle. The third type is more long term and represents TRL levels 1-2. This project will develop technologies that could reduce the need for maintenance and therefore reduce the whole life cost of a high value product. The five initial projects are as follows:Project 1: Study of cross sector challenges in coupled whole systems design (6 mths)Project 2: Reduction of no-fault found (NFF) through system design (3 yrs)Project 3: Characterisation of in-service component feedback for system design (3 yrs)Project 4: Improvement of System Design Process for whole life cost reduction (2 yrs)Project 5: Self-healing technologies for electronic and mechanical components and subsystems (3 yrs)All the initial projects and future ones will use the facilities of a Whole Systems Studio at Cranfield. The Studio will provide instrumentation and facilities to perform experiments in support of the initial and future research projects and develop technology and process demonstrators. The Studio will have a networked computing facility with a data highway based on the OSys integration platform. The platform will initially allow other facilities such as the 3D scanning facility from GOM, Electronics Lab from Durham, IVHM Centre at Cranfield and MRO Shop at Rolls Royce, Derby to be connected with the Studio. In future, other research groups and laboratories will be given access to the Studio as well.The core partners of the Centre are Rolls-Royce, BAE Systems, Bombardier Transport, ARM and the Ministry of Defence (MoD). The partners represent aerospace, defence, railways and electronics sectors. There are 13 other industrial partners representing user companies from defence, information technology (IT), machine tool, and energy sectors and knowledge transfer networks (aerospace, energy and electronics), software vendor, media partner and trade organisations as dissemination partner to support the growth of the Centre.