Articles
I’ve been involved with CFMS, which was established by Airbus, BAE Systems, Williams F1, Frazer-Nash Consultancy, MBDA UK and Rolls-Royce, from its earliest days, so I was very pleased to be asked to become its first independent chairman. Computer-aided engineering and simulation have been important areas for me since my student days – and as part of my first job I worked with British Steel in the early 1970s on simulating steelmaking processes. Simulation and CAE have thus been there right through my career, and it’s been interesting to see how they have developed over the years.
The effectiveness of simulation as part of the design process has really come on in leaps and bounds. The results you get from it are very sound – so you don’t necessarily need to build things and test them, you can be fairly certain of the output you’re getting from the simulation. You end up with a better design too.
Can simulation replace physical testing altogether? Perhaps, although there is an issue around confidence in the results you get from it. I think companies using it for production engineering are confident in the technology but there are other issues in terms of regulation, health and safety regimes and public confidence. One of my bugbears concerns the lack of wider scientific knowledge among the public and also their ability to measure and understand risk.
As a nation we’ve lost the ability to judge and measure risk and understand what it really is – it’s all tied in with the misinterpretation of health and safety legislation. Risk needs to be understood and interpreted in the right way. We’re happy as individuals to use mobile phones and withstand the level of radiation coming from them because they have individual benefits. But as soon as you start talking about putting up a mobile phone mast in areas people get very concerned and view them as too great a risk. They don’t really understand that the level of radiation coming from the masts is far lower than the phone they happily use day in, day out. Real understanding of science involves an appreciation of risk, and there is an issue around that for the public generally.
In terms of simulation we are getting much better at understanding it and accepting the results of simulation. At the end of the day what it means is we can speed up our ability to design, and analyse that design, arriving at a better end result. At CFMS, I will be working with our member companies and the wider supply chain to try and promote simulation as a design tool through our associated research centre ASRC and the development of our associates programme. There’s a vast amount of companies using simulation in all sorts of ways in this country already.
In one of my other roles, I work for the South West Regional Development Agency (RDA), which is due to shut down along with others around the country in 2012. I’ve always looked after technology and innovation for them from my position on the board, and aerospace and high value-added manufacturing are important for the region. We now need to ensure that the legacy of the RDAs is not lost in the transition to Local Enterprise Partnerships and other bodies.
The government’s decision to create new Technology and Innovation Centres around the country is a fantastic opportunity in the wake of the Hauser review. The government’s announced a reasonable amount of money for the centres and now it’s up to the Technology Strategy Board, where I am a board member, to really implement them in the right way. The first call has already come out to create a centre for high value-added manufacturing, which is something we do incredibly well in this country.
Nick Buckland