Measuring and manufacturing - EPSRC Centre launch
Mon, 14 Nov 2011 09:57:00 GMT
Speakers at the EPSRC Centre launch event included Professor Professor Peter Knight (left), Professor Jane Jiang and Professor David Delpy.
LEADING scientists, business executives and policy makers gathered to launch a new £8 million research centre at the University of Huddersfield.
A key theme which emerged during speeches was that Britain was still a major manufacturing nation and the economy will be boosted by world-class research conducted by university scientists in partnership with innovative industrial companies. The new Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Advanced Metrology at the University of Huddersfield would be a prime example of this in action.
The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has provided funding and support for the new Centre, which has also attracted backing from a large consortium of companies and organisations.
The Centre will focus on research leading to the creation of a ‘factory on a machine’. By harnessing the potential of advanced metrology instrumentation, this will enable machine tools to achieve massive improvements in accuracy. There will be great gains in productivity and the way will be paved for the next generation of engineering products.
The EPSRC Centre was opened in October by Business Secretary Dr Vince Cable. Now this has been followed by the official launch day which opened with a session, chaired by University Director of Research and Enterprise Dr Liz Towns-Andrews, at which delegates heard talks from experts closely involved in the project.
After an introduction by University Vice-Chancellor Professor Bob Cryan – who described the University’s research strategy and its long tradition of providing support to industry – the first guest to speak was Professor David Delpy, who is Chief Executive of the EPSRC.
He stressed the importance of manufacturing to Britain’s economy.
“What is encouraging is that there is now a real understanding by the Government that a modern economy is one that makes things,” he said. “We tend not to make enough of the fact that we are still the seventh largest manufacturer in the world.”
Professor Delpy described the long-term support that the EPSRC was providing to the UK manufacturing sector and he stressed that one priority was to make sure that academic research came to the aid of UK PLC.
The EPSRC’s network of Centres for Innovative Manufacturing were a key part of the strategy and Prof Delpy said he was keen to encourage the movement of researchers between industry and the academic world. It was essential that research was world-leading, that it addressed long-term manufacturing challenges and provided strong support to UK firms.
Another guest speaker was Professor Peter Knight, who chairs the Advisory Group of the new EPSRC Centre. He emphasised the crucial importance of its work. The UK was increasingly dependent on high-value manufacturing and the science of measurement was crucial to this.
The Director of the new EPSRC Centre is the leading metrologist Professor Jane Jiang, of the University of Huddersfield’s globally-renowned Centre for Precision Technologies (CPT). She explained the technical background to the ‘factory on a machine’ project and described the technological resources and equipment available to the research team.
Professor Liam Blunt, who heads the CPT, is platform co-ordinator for the EPSRC Centre. He outlined the relationships that had been formed between the new Centre and its industrial partners – and he anticipated that their numbers would increase over the years.
In addition to a core group of Tier 1 partners, there were also a number of smaller companies who would gain valuable access to the expertise and facilities of the new Centre. Because of the level of funding, it would be possible to conduct strategic research over a longer period than was the norm for university projects, said Professor Blunt, and he also envisaged that a number of smaller-scale, higher risk, “frontier research” projects would take shape.
Research had already led to a number of patents being applied for – “and we will endeavour to make sure that they are taken up by industry,” said Professor Blunt.
Also speaking at the event was Dr Sam Beale, of Rolls Royce, one of several high-prestige partners in the EPSRC Centre. Engineering excellence was impossible without the science of measurement, he stressed. Mr William Lee, of the major engineering firm Renishaw – also a partner in the Centre – described some of collaborations that had already taken place with the experts at Huddersfield.
