We are witnessing huge global shifts towards cleaner growth and more resource efficient economies. The drive to lower carbon emissions is resulting in dramatic changes in how we travel and the ways we generate and use energy worldwide. Electrical machines are at the heart of the accelerating trends in the electrification of transport and the increased use of renewable energy such as offshore wind. To address the pressing drivers for clean growth and meet the increasing demands of new applications, new electrical machines with improved performance - higher power density, lower weight, improved reliability - are being designed by researchers and industry. However, there are significant manufacturing challenges to be overcome if UK industry is going to be able to manufacture these new machines with the appropriate cost, flexibility and quality. The Hub's vision is to put UK manufacturing at the forefront of the electrification revolution. The Hub will address key manufacturing challenges in the production of high integrity and high value electrical machines for the aerospace, energy, high value automotive and premium consumer sectors. The Hub will work in partnership with industry to address some common and fundamental barriers limiting manufacturing capability and capacity: the need for in-process support to manual operations in electrical machine manufacture - e.g. coil winding, insertions, electrical connections and wiring - to improve productivity and provide quality assurance; the sensitivity of high value and high integrity machines to small changes in tolerance and the requirement for high precision in manufacturing for safety critical applications; the increasing drive to low batch size, flexibility and customisation; and the need to train the next generation of manufacturing scientists and engineers. The Hub's research programme will explore new and emerging manufacturing processes, new materials for enhanced functionality and/or light-weighting, new approaches for process modelling and simulation, and the application of digital approaches with new sensors and Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) technologies.

The key output of the 12-month follow-on funding period will be a commercially exploitable tool 'Discrete Event Simulator for Modelling Support Services'. Discrete event simulation involves the modelling of a system, as it evolves over time, by representing the changes as separate events. In discrete event simulation, the operation of a system is represented as a chronological sequence of events. Each event occurs at an instant in time and marks a change of state in the system. Within the parent EPSRC project of this proposal (EP/F038526/1, 2008-09), the investigators have used discrete event simulation to develop models of various basic scenarios in the context of an engineering-based service environment. This simulation work provides the focus and research results for this follow-on fund proposal.The aim of the proposed project is to develop a commercially exploitable discrete event simulation tool customised for modelling support services within various engineering-based service environments. The proposed simulation tool will help to address the lack of modelling tools experienced by manufacturers who traditionally manufactured engineering products but are now moving into the provision of services to support these products. These companies currently do not have access to customised modelling capabilities to assess the impact of changing their support service strategies. The current tools for service simulation appear to be generally taken from innovation or business development methodologies, and are therefore aimed at high level decision making within an organisation and cannot directly be applied to the detailed design of support services. The field of discrete event simulation and the commercial tools available (such as Witness from Lanner Group Limited, Arena from Rockwell Automation and Simul8 from Simul8 Corporation) have also typically focused in the past on modelling a manufacturer's production operations rather than service operations. The use of existing simulation tools for modelling support services is therefore very time consuming and requires a high level of modelling skills and knowledge beyond that normally required. The vision of this project is to develop a commercially exploitable discrete event simulation tool that can reduce the time required for modelling support services from months to days and significantly reduce the level of modelling skills and knowledge required. The proposed follow-on project will focus on technical and business development activities necessary for achieving this vision. The unique selling point of the proposed simulation tool is its ability to model support services within various engineering-based service environments. Given the increasing importance of service-related operations for the UK engineering sector, this tool is likely to have a high impact on the industry.By modelling the combined effects of physical elements (such as physical assets, service personnel and spare parts) and information flows within an engineering environment, the proposed simulation tool will allow companies to analyse the impact of different levels of information provision on different contract types. In this way, companies will be able to use the proposed simulation tool to assess, with ease, the potential service needs of their customer base and how these needs can be best achieved. They will also be able to determine bottlenecks in business processes that deliver the support services. The tool will also allow for 'what-if' analysis aiding the decision making process in industry. End users of the tool will be able to examine the cost-benefit effect of service provision with their products. The tool can be used as an aid to the development of business models for the adoption of information technology (such as Integrated Vehicle Health Management - IVHM) for service operations. It can also help in identifying service scenarios that benefit most from information technology implementation.

The success of today's global supply networks depends on the efficient and effective communication of design descriptions (including design intent and shape definitions) that suit the requirements and capabilities of the wide range of engineering functions, processes and suppliers involved in the delivery of products to markets. Technical product data packages are used to provide these design descriptions. At a recent industry summit, a representative of Boeing noted that some 40% of the technical data needed to create a product resides outside the shape definitions in the technical product data package. The focus of this project is on the Bills of Materials (BoMs) that are integral parts of both shape definitions and the 40% of non-shape related product data. BoMs are fundamental because they act as integrators: adapting detailed design descriptions to suit the needs of particular engineering processes. The ability to reconfigure BoMs while maintaining internal consistency of the technical data package (where all BoM configurations are complete and compatible with each other) is a major challenge. This proposal builds on a feasibility study that explored the use of embedding* to associate multiple BoMs with a single design description. From an engineering design perspective, based on discussions with four local SMEs and work on a case study related to a Rolls-Royce combustion system, we uncovered an urgent industry need to be able to associate multiple BoMs with one or more design descriptions. This need has remained hidden because current design technologies tend to subsume BoMs in proprietary data representations. However, engineers use BoMs and other design structures to adapt design descriptions for specific purposes. For this reason, new design technologies are needed that make BoMs and other design structures available for engineers to work with directly. From a design technology perspective, we have demonstrated that hypercube lattices can act as computational spaces within which BoMs can be reconfigured. However, the generated lattices are vast and, although we made in excess of hundred-fold improvements in the speed of lattice generation after consultation with the Leeds Advanced Research Computing team, the problem remains exponential in nature. For this project, the lattices will remain in the background, as a part of the technical apparatus. From an organisational psychology perspective, the ability to reconfigure BoMs creates opportunities for new ways of managing engineering knowledge in product development systems that take account of human and organisational behaviours, and individual preferences. The goal of this project is to establish theoretical foundations, validated through a series of sharable software prototypes, to enable the reconfiguration of BoMs. The software prototypes will be designed for use by academic and industrial users to experiment with their own data and build understanding of the kinds of functionality required in such design tools. This will allow companies to better specify their long term information technology requirements for their IT system providers. A staged software engineering process will be used and a series of open source prototypes published at roughly six month intervals. This will create opportunities for meaningful interactions within the research team, and give industry partners early access to the research and opportunities to influence the research direction. In parallel, through the development of case studies in collaboration with industry partners and colleagues in other disciplines, we will build understanding of other types of design structure that occur in engineering design processes and develop cross-disciplinary learning opportunities. * Embedding is a mathematical mechanism that allows one instance of a construct to be superimposed on another.

Composite materials represent the future landscape for many industries. The possibility of combining better mechanical strength and reduced weight make composites the material of choice in transportation allowing unique design and functionalities in combination with high fuel efficiency. However, the increased use of composites, automatically leads to waste, either end-of-life or manufacturing waste. It is estimated that in the EU by 2015 end of life composite waste will reach 251,000 tonnes and production waste will achieve 53,000 tonnes. The composites industry, (in particular carbon fibre) is under increasing pressure to provide viable recycling technology for their materials. This is the case because the European Commission has controlled landfill and incineration of these materials. Through research and development of novel recycling and re-manufacture processes, this EXHUME project will provide a step-change in composites resource efficiency. These composite materials evoke difficult scientific and technical recycling challenges due to the mixed nature of their composition. The project will demonstrate to the waste industry, vital re-manufacturing science and chemical/process engineering. It will develop the first data sets and exemplars of mixed composite processing and associated resource footprints that can be used to drive the future of scrap re-use across industrial sectors. This project is pioneering in that it: i) Is the first cross-sector research-inspired use of heterogeneous scrap material in manufacture. ii) Develops novel transformation technologies to process thermoset and thermoplastic composites. iii) Develops a fundamental understanding of microstructure-property relationship in scrap material and in manufacturing process science. iv) Provides vital support to companies to exploit the scrap re-manufacturing technology. v) Evaluates the energy and resource efficiency of composite, re-processing, re-use and re-manufacture assessing the environmental impact and business case.

Composite materials represent the future landscape for many industries. The possibility of combining better mechanical strength and reduced weight make composites the material of choice in transportation allowing unique design and functionalities in combination with high fuel efficiency. However, the increased use of composites, automatically leads to waste, either end-of-life or manufacturing waste. It is estimated that in the EU by 2015 end of life composite waste will reach 251,000 tonnes and production waste will achieve 53,000 tonnes. The composites industry, (in particular carbon fibre) is under increasing pressure to provide viable recycling technology for their materials. This is the case because the European Commission has controlled landfill and incineration of these materials. Through research and development of novel recycling and re-manufacture processes, this EXHUME project will provide a step-change in composites resource efficiency. These composite materials evoke difficult scientific and technical recycling challenges due to the mixed nature of their composition. The project will demonstrate to the waste industry, vital re-manufacturing science and chemical/process engineering. It will develop the first data sets and exemplars of mixed composite processing and associated resource footprints that can be used to drive the future of scrap re-use across industrial sectors. This project is pioneering in that it: i) Is the first cross-sector research-inspired use of heterogeneous scrap material in manufacture. ii) Develops novel transformation technologies to process thermoset and thermoplastic composites. iii) Develops a fundamental understanding of microstructure-property relationship in scrap material and in manufacturing process science. iv) Provides vital support to companies to exploit the scrap re-manufacturing technology. v) Evaluates the energy and resource efficiency of composite, re-processing, re-use and re-manufacture assessing the environmental impact and business case.