Digital Qualification Platform for Advanced Alloy Components

In this project a team of world experts in metallurgy, mechanical engineering, and machine learning will collaborate to build a Digital Qualification Platform for Additive Manufacture ("3D printing").

Additive Manufacture ("AM") has the potential to transform for the better the way a vast range of advanced components are manufactured. It can create objects that are lighter, more intricate and functional, and made from more advanced materials than other manufacturing technologies, and it can do so using less raw material and completely digitally, so no tooling is required. Full use of AM could transform prospects for lower-energy, lower-emission aeroplanes and cars, powered by more sustainable fuels, as well as creating new opportunities in electronics, medical implants, and many other markets.

However, AM faces a major barrier to adoption: the cost of designing an optimal component, and proving beyond doubt that can do its job safely for as long as it is required. This has always been a challenge and an expense in aerospace, requiring many millions spent on expensive trials, but it is a particular hurdle for AM, as a novel technology which builds up a component from billions of tiny welds.

This project aims to build a future in which new materials and components are designed and proved safe entirely by computational means, saving years of time and millions of pounds, as well as accelerating innovation in aerospace and elsewhere. It will do this by building a Digital Qualification Platform for AM materials and components, including software-packaged computational models and a world-class experimental facility, and demonstrating the Platform through the certification of a heat exchange component built during the project for test flight on a Boeing aircraft.

Once applied to AM, the Platform will then be extended to speed innovation, decrease costs, and reduce waste in traditional manufacture. The Project will also create 46 highly-skilled new jobs now and over 2,500 by 2035\.

The four-year project will be led by Alloyed, a high-growth technology business based in Oxford, and include Boeing, Renishaw, the manufacturer of AM hardware, TWI Ltd, the UK Atomic Energy Authority, Imperial College, and the Universities of Manchester and Sheffield.