In a world facing volatile challenges, from climate change to political upheaval, it can be difficult to imagine what manufacturing may look like in a decade, let alone in 2075. Yet this is exactly what some of the brightest minds at Cranfield University attempted to do in a symposium held in December.
The event was organised in a bid to stimulate “long-term manufacturing research”. And it showed novel ways in which research and manufacturing might evolve in response to the challenges we may face in the not too distant future.
Professor Rajkumar Roy, director of manufacturing at Cranfield, believes there will be four big challenges for industry: people global environment, intelligent materials and technology. Taking a look at people, he said, one key trend will be in delivering highly personalised products in large volumes.
We are already seeing the beginning of personalised manufacturing with companies such as mobile phone maker Vertu. With its made-to-order service you can design a phone from a selection of high-end materials, from calf and alligator leather covers to embedded precious stones. Alternatively, the firm’s bespoke service lets you create your own unique design from scratch. The phones can cost up to £25,000.
Meanwhile, BAC Mono, a Liverpool manufacturer, offers the only road-legal single-seater supercar in the world, which is highly customisable. Customers are involved in the design process from the start, and the steering wheel and seat are moulded to fit the owner.
Neill Briggs, co-founder of BAC Mono, said: “The car is tailored to the driver, so every one we make is different.” The company uses 3D printing for elements such as the steering wheel to increase manufacturing speed.
So far the trend for personalisation is still fairly limited and focused around high-end products – the BAC Mono car has a starting price of £125,000. But Roy believes that mass customisation will become commonplace, and we could even see the genetic customisation of food tailored to each individual’s unique biological requirements.
There are challenges in offering mass customisation, not least in keeping costs down while ensuring quality control. Companies are already beginning to develop manufacturing methods that offer more flexibility and personalisation. For example, Cambridge Consultants has recently announced its method of continuously manufacturing microcapsules – making personalisation of products possible for a range of industries from pharmaceuticals to food.
Microcapsules are small droplets – less than 0.1mm in diameter – of a delicate material enclosed by a protective coating. These are used in fertilisers and pesticides used on crops, to preserve flavouring in chewing gum, and for the fragrance in laundry. Microcapsules ensure that the release of ingredients from products occurs at the right moment.
Until now microcapsules have been made in bulk and tend to be uneconomic for small batches. Cambridge Consultants’ manufacturing device operates continuously to create microcapsules, ensuring that they are of a consistent quality. The device can be speeded up or slowed down to change the size of the capsule and create tailored products.
Andrew Strong, head of manufacturing innovation at Cambridge Consultants, said: “Development costs are reduced by removing the need to produce a full batch. This makes it easier to tailor the chemistry to the application – for example, producing biodegradable shells.”
Changing consumer tastes will not be the only impact people will have on manufacturing. Population size will increase, putting strain on resources and driving the demand for more sustainable materials. And geopolitical events, from wars to climate change, could exacerbate the scarcity of raw materials, forcing factories to approach manufacturing and the use of materials in wholly new ways.
Katie Daniel, lead on future manufacturing at the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, envisions that by 2075 more products will be made in the UK rather than shipped from all over the world. This would not only reduce CO2 emissions but increase economic resilience. She added that there could be a much more circular economy, whereby manufacturers do not just use recycled materials but think at the beginning of the design process about how products can be repaired or reused.
Professor Steve Evans, director of research in industrial sustainability at Cambridge University, echoed this vision. “Raw materials like food or oil may have disrupted availability in the future,” he said. “Manufacturers may need to avoid crisis minerals that could suddenly stop being supplied, or there may be a desire to reduce imports to increase a country’s resilience.”
He said there is likely to be a massive push for resource efficiency. And he foresees a time when taxes on materials could be raised to enforce sustainability.
Such events could lead to so-called “foraging factories”. Evans explained that a local factory would only use raw materials that could be found, for example, within a day’s bike ride. “By 2075 every product will have sensors,” he said. “So if a kettle or a car was close to breaking then the factory could be made aware and put a bid in for the raw material.” And manufacturers could use raw materials left over post-harvest on nearby farms. This would require factories to be highly flexible and able to adjust production, as well as better at extracting value from natural raw materials.
This idea of smaller, more adaptable and localised factories is beginning to take hold, as is the concept of reusing materials. This can be seen in companies such as Liberty Steel, which will use green energy to “upcycle” the glut of scrap steel that we have in the UK, from its melting through to the engineering of advanced products. This is in a bid to lower imports.
An overriding message from the Cranfield event is that the UK must get better at translating its research into real industrial applications. Dr Phil Cartwright, chief technology officer at the High-Value Manufacturing (HVM) Catapult, stressed that, while the UK has not been great at doing so in recent years, his organisation is working to change that.
Many of these forthcoming challenges are being explored at the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre’s Factory 2050 facility in Leeds, which is funded in part by the HVM Catapult. The building is home to the research centre’s Integrated Manufacturing Group and is the UK’s first totally reconfigurable, digital factory for collaborative research.
Among other things, the group is developing ways of meeting demand for high variation and mass customisation in products, techniques to shorten lead times and ramp production up and down rapidly, ways of handling big data, human-machine collaboration, and techniques for digitally assisted assembly.
It is vital that this kind of collaborative research work continues to be supported by government and industry alike to prepare for whatever the future holds, said Cartwright.