Brunel University - Equipment Account

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Over the last few years EPSRC has invested significantly in metal casting research at Brunel's research institute BCAST, notably in the EPSRC Centre - LiME (£6M) in 2010, the TARF-LCV programme (£4.2M) in 2011 and other responsive mode projects (£1M). Both the LiME and TARF-LCV programmes were founded on our long-term vision for full metal circulation: that the global demand for metallic materials should be met by a full circulation of secondary metals with only limited addition of primary metals each year, which can be achieved by effective reuse, remanufacture, closed-loop recycling and effective recovery of secondary metals. This full metal circulation represents a paradigm shift for metallurgical science, manufacturing technology and the industrial landscape. LiME was founded to provide a solid foundation for full metal circulation. Although substantial progress [3] has been made in the fundamental understanding of heterogeneous nucleation, developing new metallic materials and advancing casting technologies under both LiME and TARF-LCV the industrial adoption and exploitation of the research output has been constrained, mainly due to the lack of scale-up facilities to take the lab-proven concepts and processing technologies to a suitable level, at which industrial companies are willing to take the risk to conduct industrial trials. We propose to establish a unique national scale-up facility for light metal casting research to be hosted in the Advanced Metal Casting Centre (AMCC) at Brunel University. AMCC aims to bridge the gap between fundamental research and industrial applications. Together with the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Liquid Metal Engineering (LiME for short), the AMCC will provide high performance light alloys, resource efficient casting technologies and component innovations to meet the long- and mid-term needs of the automotive industry. To set up the AMCC we are requesting £3.9M from EPSRC to match a £2.5M investment by Brunel University for capital equipment and infrastructure and £3.15M cash and £3.36M in-kind contributions from our industrial partners for the initial research projects. The scale-up facilities will be installed in a purpose-built 1000m2 laboratory complete with power, water and gas supply. The new facilities will enable and enhance our established research capability in many different areas, such as liquid metal engineering, alloy development, processing technologies and component innovation. We will work closely with the automotive industry and its supply chain.