Engineering news
Engineering student Daniella Tiboaca is pictured measuring the acceleration of a Piper Tomahawk wing.
The University of Sheffield has been awarded a £4 million investment from the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) to support the build of the largest dynamic test facilities in the UK.
The new £4 million grant takes the total current investment in the facility to £11 million. Professor Philip Nelson, chief executive of the EPSRC, said: “This £4m investment will provide a step change in structural dynamics research and position the UK as a world leader in this field.
“By investing in this area of research and innovation at Sheffield, we are providing an internationally excellent platform supporting industry and business to help deliver a successful economy and future growth.”
The facility will enable the University of Sheffield to work with industry to test and research engineering structures and systems from the component level to full scale. It will also allow testing across a range of environments previously inaccessible to academic research.
A modular environmental chamber in the laboratory will be able to control temperature, humidity and wind speed as well as simulate rain and snow. The ability to test in realistic conditions at full scale will pave the way for engineers to create lighter, greener, safer structures.
Professor Richard Jones, pro-vice-chancellor for Research and Innovation at the University of Sheffield, said: “Computer simulation of models of the way large structures behave in use are increasingly powerful, but for industry to realise the full benefits of these techniques we need to test these models against large scale experimental data, so they can be confident of their results.
“This facility will allow us to do this testing, giving industry confidence in the models and allowing faster and therefore more cost effective product developments in a number of different industry sectors.
“Better modelling also means we will be able to move from structures that have a safe-life design philosophy to a damage-tolerant one which offers cost savings through extending the lifetime of existing structures.”
Led by the Dynamics Research Group in the University’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, the laboratory will offer “significant benefits” across a range of industrial sectors including energy, aerospace, renewables and medical engineering.
Professor Keith Worden, head of the DRG, and soon to be director of the new centre, said: “Advances in structural dynamics hold the key to major cost reductions across many of the UK’s priority industrial engineering sectors.
“This facility will have the ability to test structures like helicopters and airframes at full-scale and will present the UK with a unique opportunity to take a world lead in verification and validation.”
The new development contributes towards the UK’s first “Advanced Manufacturing Innovation District”, which will provide a centre of productivity for the so-called Northern Powerhouse, championed by the prime minister.
Construction is already underway on the first project at the site, the £43 million Factory 2050 which will be the UK’s first fully reconfigurable assembly and component manufacturing facility for collaborative research. Plans are also in place to develop the existing Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC), which could create 1,800 new jobs and provide an annual direct contribution of up to £74.2 million to the local economy.
Other new research buildings could include the £30 million National Material Institute, which is part of the Sir Henry Royce Institute for Advanced Materials announced in December and a £20 million Fast Make Centre of Excellence.