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AMRC Cymru
Product & process verification (PPV) Centre of Excellence
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Founded in 2019, the AMRC Product & Process Verification (PPV) Centre of Excellence houses the Airbus Wing of Tomorrow programme and provides research and development support for the Welsh aerospace sector and the wider Welsh manufacturing community.
Thanks to ATI support, AMRC Cymru, part of the University of Sheffield, has grown to a 50 engineer, £4 million turnover business which offers an invaluable resource to Welsh manufacturers in aerospace and beyond, supporting them in the adoption of industry 4.0 and sustainable manufacturing processes.
The project’s objectives were to establish a new Centre of Excellence for product and process verification that would house the ATI-funded Airbus Wing of Tomorrow programme and provide R&D support for the Welsh aerospace sector and to help the region’s wider manufacturing community access advanced technologies that will drive improvements in productivity, performance and quality.
To support both of these objectives, the £3.5m capital grant from the ATI was secured to help AMRC Cymru establish itself as an innovation hub for the development of Industry 4.0 digital tools to capture, process and use data from the product or process throughout the manufacturing cycle to make it more efficient and eliminate nonvalue added activity. The equipment was scoped initially with aerostructure applications in mind with partners at Airbus and BAE Systems but will also have a wider impact across all manufacturing sectors. The equipment purchased with the ATI grant has enabled a critical PPV capability to be built at AMRC Cymru. This is pivotal to the centre’s offering to industry and has enabled a growth that has seen over 50 engineering roles created at the Broughton facility.
The centre now generates an annual turnover of £4m through the delivery of research projects utilising this technology. This growth is continuing with a further 10 engineering roles to be created in Q1 2024 and a forecast to be at 75 FTE by the end of 2025. All the projects delivered by AMRC Cymru rely on this capability.
Two such projects within the aerospace sector are:
1. Ffatri 4.0: Sustainable manufacturing and assembly | AMRC.
This Welsh Government funded project utilised Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) equipment procured with the ATI grant to help AMRC Cymru/Airbus establish the scope one emissions of the joint facility through the monitoring of electricity, gas and water usage and of the waste produced. The project resulted in an electricity saving over three months of over 22,000 kg CO2e (equivalent to 41 three-bedroom houses for a year) and over 47,000 kg CO2e (21 three-bedroom house for a year). The success of this project has led to Airbus and AMRC Cymru seeking and securing funding from ATI for the SuSWing project which seeks to apply more IIoT sensors to aerospace production equipment to establish a more granular understanding of when, why and how energy is being used through the production process. With this data Airbus will then be able to develop a blueprint for an energy optimised production process. In addition, the methodology developed through the Ffatri 4.0 program is currently being rolled out to manufacturers across Wales through AMRC Cymru’s FAST programme to help them to reduce the CO2 emissions of their manufacturing processes.
2. Building smart production lines for aerospace | AMRC
This project with Collins Aerospace utilised SMART tool and workbench technology purchased through the PPV grant to develop a proof of principal SMART workstation to evaluate how efficiency and quality of manual assembly operations can be improved using SMART technologies. The use case of an actuation gearbox assembly process demonstrated that an operator with little or no experience can correctly assemble the gearbox as efficiently as experienced operators. As a result, Collins have now invested in several SMART workstations and are developing applications across their civil and military product range. This technology and the learning from this project are now being used to help Toyota to develop a hydrogen fuel cell assembly system. This is seen as critical project for the Toyota Deeside plant to help it build the future capability to compete for workshare in new product lines once/if the ban on ICE powertrains comes into effect.
Away from aerospace
AMRC Cymru are engaged in multiple SME digital transformation programmes across Wales and Cheshire, via Welsh Government and regional Shared Prosperity funding. To date, AMRC Cymru have engaged with over 75 SMEs with notable success. For instance, helping startups Pragmatic and Polytag develop their plastic waste management solutions and Magellen Aerospace & PA Pallets to install machine tool monitoring sensors onto their shop floors. All four of those projects have directly utilised the capital equipment acquired using the ATI grant.
The capital equipment has also been utilised to develop a potentially game changing large volume metrology system with AMRC Cymru’s partners at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL). The first stage of the project has been funded by Welsh Government for £250k with the objective of scaling up NPL’s Frequency Scanned Interferometry prototype from lab scale to a representative industrial environment. The team have used aircraft wing jig calibration as the case study and the trials have shown that system is equal if not better than current ‘best in class’ in terms of accuracy but is able to capture that data in a fraction of the time. Further developments and live shop floor trials at Airbus and BAE are currently underway, funded through the HVMC.
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Total project value:
£3.5m
75
forecast engineering jobs
£4m
turnover
Industry 4.0
adoption
"The PPV grant has been fundamental to the success of AMRC Cymru and is at the centre of our offering to Welsh and UK manufacturers to support them through their Industry 4.0 and Net Zero transformation. Without the funding it would simply not have been possible for us to be the 50 engineer, £4m turnover business we are today. We can only thank ATI for the support they have provided which, as our stakeholders at Welsh Government will attest, has helped us develop a national asset."
Andy SilcoxResearch Director, AMRC Cymru
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