MakerSpaces and Fab Labs are open, publicly-accessible workshops, which provide people with access to cutting-edge tools and technologies (both digital and analogue), which they can use for completing design projects. These sites are commonly run as collectives, with equipment gifted or purchased from donations. Much as public libraries serve to educate a resource-impoverished public, MakerSpaces and Fab Labs provide access to resources too expensive for people to readily own themselves and act to up-skill a community, by providing informal training and knowledge exchange for, and about, design and manufacturing skills. As 'smart objects' become more commonplace the potential for developing, designing and tinkering with 'Internet-of-Things' enabled devices becomes more everyday and yet more complicated, as there will be greater technical barriers to participation (DIY with digital technologies seems understandably harder for the general public). As it becomes possible for people to make their own technologies, and to modify and customise existing ones that they own, MakerSpaces and Fab Labs will increasingly lead the way in supporting people to do just these activities. However, we understand relatively little about how these sites work well, or badly, and about how we can use digital tools to support processes of 'open design' or knowledge exchange, in which design understanding is shared amongst communities. Consequently, we need to go and visit these sites to study them, in situ. Alongside this, manufacturing will increasingly come closer to the consumer, with print-on-demand, rapid production and personalization / customization. There is a great opportunity to explore how open design platforms (web-based technologies) might loop in manufacturers, such that they can become consumers of design skills amongst design communities (setting challenges and federating or 'crowd-sourcing' their design and innovation requirements). But also, crucially, feeding back in to these communities and design collectives, to provide deeper understanding about design processes and techniques, thereby up-skilling the public to create a more design-informed population. Consequently, we need to spend time talking to and working with manufacturers to understand their perspectives on processes of 'open design' and to use both this knowledge and our work with communities in MakerSpaces to co-design a new prototype web-based 'open design' platform, which we can then trial with manufacturers and design communities. The project will also work to understand how new communities of people can be brought in-to-the-fold of design activity, reducing the barriers to participation in design spaces. This will be done through the production of a simple Mobile Fab Lab, which can be toured between sites, such as schools, exposing new audiences to the tools and technologies of the MakerSpace, and fostering a broader interest in processes of 'open design'.

There are clear drivers in the transport industry towards lower fuel consumption and CO2 emissions through the introduction of designs involving combinations of different material classes, such as steel, titanium, magnesium and aluminium alloys, metal sheet and castings, and laminates in more efficient hybrid structures. The future direction of the transport industry will thus undoubtedly be based on multi-material solutions. This shift in design philosophy is already past the embryonic stage, with the introduction of aluminium front end steel body shells (BMW 5 series) and the integration of aluminium sheet and magnesium high pressure die castings in aluminium car bodies (e.g. Jaguar XK).Such material combinations are currently joined by fasteners, which are expensive and inefficient, as they are very difficult to weld by conventional technologies like electrical resistance spot, MIG arc, and laser welding. New advanced solid state friction based welding techniques can potentially overcome many of the issues associated with joining dissimilar material combinations, as they lower the overall heat input and do not melt the materials. This greatly reduces the tendency for poor bond strengths, due to interfacial reaction and solidification cracking, as well as damage to thermally sensitive materials like laminates and aluminium alloys used in automotive bodies, which are designed to harden during paint baking. Friction joining techniques are also far more efficient, resulting in energy savings of > 90% relative to resistance spot and laser welding, are more robust processes, and can be readily used in combination with adhesive bonding.This project, in close collaboration with industry (e.g. Jaguar - Land Rover, Airbus, Corus, Meridian, Novelis, TWI, Sonobond) will investigate materials and process issues associated with optimising friction joining of hybrid, more mass efficient structures, focusing on; Friction Stir, Friction Stir Spot, and High Power Ultrasonic Spot welding. The work will be underpinned by novel approaches to developing models of these exciting new processes and detailed analysis and modelling of key material interactions, such as interfacial bonding / reaction and weld microstructure formation.

One third of the world's energy is used in industry to make products - the buildings, infrastructure, vehicles, capital equipment and household goods that sustain our lifestyles. Most of this energy is needed in the early stages of production to convert raw materials, such as iron ore or trees, into stock materials like steel plates or reels of paper and because these materials are sold cheaply, but use a lot of energy, they are already extremely energy efficient. Therefore, the key materials with which we create modern lifestyles - steel, cement, plastic, paper and aluminium in particular - are the main 'carriers' of industrial energy, and if we want to make a big reduction in industrial energy use, we need to reduce our demand for these materials. In the UK, our recent history has led to closure of much of our capacity to make these materials, and although this has led to reductions in emissions occurring on UK territory, in reality our consumption of materials has grown, and the world's use of energy and emission of greenhouse gases has risen as our needs are met through imports. The proposed UK INDEMAND Centre therefore aims to enable delivery of significant reductions in the use of both energy and energy-intensive materials in the Industries that supply the UK's physical needs. To achieve this, we need to understand the operation and performance of the whole material and energy system of UK industry; we need to understand better our patterns of consumption both in households, and in government and industry purchasing, particularly related to replacement decisions; we need to look for opportunities to innovate in products, processes and business models to use less material while serving the same need; and we need to identify the policy, business and consumer triggers that would lead to significant change while supporting UK prosperity. The proposer team have already developed broad-ranging work aiming to address this need, in close collaboration with industry and government partners: at Cambridge, the WellMet2050 project has opened the door to recognising Material Efficiency as a strategy for saving energy and reducing emissions, and established a clear trajectory for business growth with reduced total material demand; in Bath, work on embodied energy and emissions has created a widely adopted database of materials, and the Transitions and Pathways project has established a clear set of policy opportunities for low carbon technologies that we can now apply to demand reduction; work on energy and emissions embodied in trade at Leeds has shown how UK emissions and energy demand in industry have declined largely due to a shift of production elsewhere, while the true energy requirements of our consumption have grown; work on sustainable consumption at Nottingham Trent has shown how much of our purchased material is discarded long before it is degraded, looked at how individuals define their identity through consumption, and begun to tease out possible interventions to influence these wasteful patterns of consumption. The proposal comes with over £5m of committed gearing, including cash support for at least 30 PhD students to work with the Centre and connect its work to the specific interests of consortium partners. The proposal is also strongly supported by four key government departments, the Committee on Climate Change, and a wide network of smaller organisations whose interests overlap with the proposed Centre, and who wish to collaborate to ensure rich engagement in policy and delivery processes. Mechanisms, including a Fellows programme for staff exchange in the UK and an International Visiting Fellows programme for global academic leaders, have been designed to ensure that the activities of the Centre are highly connected to the widest possible range of activities in the UK and internationally which share the motivation to deliver reductions in end-use energy demand in Industry.

The rise of the digital economy and the associated increase in demand for customised products has caused the modern premium automotive vehicle to become a complex system. Integration is expected to have increasing levels of influence on innovation for manufacturing processes. This research on the complexity of digital features concentrates on advanced manufacturing facilities for virtual integration and verification for the provision of 'Getting it right first time through good design for speed to market'. As the digital enablement of vehicles become more complex, automotive manufacturing requires a new innovative approach into modelling and simulating with improved analysis tools to successfully integrate existing technologies and processes alongside new technology to meet increasing market demand. Each of these systems requires to be successfully integrated within the vehicle to achieve a global goal. System of systems engineering (SoSE) focuses on the management and control of such complex systems, which offer more functionality and performance than the individual systems themselves. Thus, the strategic intent of the research for the Programme for Simulation Innovation is to use innovations in modelling and simulation to evolve state of the art capabilities in vehicle design and analysis for manufacturing into advanced SoSE, for the digital features of a high interaction multi-disciplinary complex vehicle. This research addresses the challenge of how to use innovative modelling and simulation for rigorous design and analysis to rapidly and reliably introduce substantially increased levels of digitally-enabled functionality into the complex vehicle. The system of systems engineering activities include: -System architecting to define structure and behaviour of the systems of the vehicle -Generation of a framework to enable traceability and relationship preserving specification to aid integration of existing and new technologies -Analysis and behaviour prediction of the vehicle to include the simulation of non-deterministic outputs within a virtual environment to reduce prototyping and time to market. -Greater concurrence in design and verification by the facility to analyse the fully integrated complex vehicle within its simulated environment. The research will specify and implement a Virtual Integration Design and Analysis environment (VIDAE) that integrates simulation from multiple disciplinary systems (e.g. chassis, driver, power train, etc.) within the design and analysis environment, to facilitate advanced modelling and analysis capabilities for the vehicle as a complex system. The prime objective is the improvement of current automotive manufacturing processes to reduce the time to market and thus increase the UK competitiveness with the global economy. The research will demonstrate an innovative path to the commercialisation of academic outputs for systems and SoS engineering that will provide academics and industry with new pioneering processes. This will give the UK a competitive edge by increasing the speed to market of academic research for systems engineering. The research also leverages key international collaborations for model based systems engineering (MBSE) that will better position the UK in the current research in the relevant international organisations. The multi-disciplinary team from Loughborough and Leeds Universities will deliver a joint research programme that addresses the challenges of SoSE for the vehicle as a complex system. New capabilities for rapid introduction of digitally enabled functionality with reduced physical prototyping will be enabled through (i) a formal framework and rigorous methods for an innovative integration of simulation and design analytics with design verification and (ii) an engineering environment for virtual design and analysis.

Over the next 25 years, society will face major challenges in health, transportation, energy and climate that will demand novel engineering solutions. Recent rapid advances in device and materials fabrication offer an important opportunity to help meet these challenges by enabling new technologies to be engineered down to the nanometre scale. Devices that manipulate fluids at the smallest scales exhibit complex and sometimes counter-intuitive phenomena that present novel scientific and technological opportunities. The scientific opportunity is to understand and model how the microscopic physics at and around phase interfaces drives the overall flow behaviour. The technological opportunity is to exploit this behaviour to design and manufacture devices with unprecedented capabilities. This research Programme is about uncovering the engineering science of flows that are intrinsically multiscale, and encapsulating this in efficient modelling software in order to enable the design of next generation technologies. This Programme aims to underpin future UK innovation in nano-structured and smart interfaces by delivering a simulation-for-design capability for nano-engineered flow technologies, as well as a better understanding of the critical interfacial fluid dynamics. We will produce software that a) resolves interfaces down to the molecular scale, and b) spans the scales relevant to the engineering application. As accurate molecular/particle methods are computationally unfeasible at engineering scales, and efficient but conventional fluids models do not capture the important molecular physics, this is a formidable multiscale problem in both time and space. Our software will have embedded intelligence that decides dynamically on the correct simulation tools needed at each interface location, for every phase combination, and matches these tools to appropriate computational platforms for maximum efficiency. The outcome will be a revolutionary new framework for simulating multiscale multiphysics systems in nature as well as engineering, greatly surpassing current modelling capabilities. The step-change advances this represents include: - predictive simulations of engineering-scale systems with nanoscale fidelity; - new insight into the physics of interfacial flow systems; - computational resources allocated in-simulation to enable more rapid system analysis; - assessment of proposed flow system designs that were not previously amenable to investigation; - accessing trans-disciplinary applications in granular flows and avalanche dynamics, and social/economic systems including urban traffic modelling and financial market stability. This work is strongly supported by 9 external partners, ranging from large multinational companies to an SME. The targeted applications all depend on the behaviour of interfaces that divide phases, and include: radical cancer treatments that exploit nano-bubble cavitation; the cooling of high-power electronics through evaporative nano-menisci; nanowire membranes for separating oil and water, e.g. for oil spills; and smart nano-structured surfaces for drag reduction and anti-fouling, with applications to low-emissions aerospace, automotive and marine transport. These applications make demands on simulation for engineering design that far outstrip current capabilities. Our partners will therefore be 'early-adopters' of this Programme's outcomes in order to meet the technical capabilities they will need to provide in the future. This interdisciplinary research draws on techniques and results across the boundaries of applied mathematics, physics, mechanical engineering, and computing. Its timeliness lies in the convergence of a uniquely-qualified academic team with a group of engaged and committed industrial partners, who will work together to exploit current and emerging nano-engineered flow systems for societal and economic benefit to the UK and elsewhere.