Following our successful application to EPSRC led by Professor Janice Barton for our sixth Centre for Doctoral Training, we are delighted to announce we will be able to train 67 doctoral students over five years starting in 2024.
The EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Innovation for Sustainable Composites Engineering will train highly skilled future leaders equipped with the expertise and resilience to address the sustainable design, manufacture, and assurance of composite products.
The focus of the Centre differs considerably to the previous ones with sustainability as a continuous thread and close interaction with industry, with research projects running across the four years of the programme. An entirely new taught programme has been designed, which aligns with structured professional development activities that focusing on creating the leaders of tomorrow.
The research projects will provide a means of achieving environmental neutrality for composite products through production, service, and reuse. The research topics include the pursuit of more sustainable composite materials, creation of energy efficient manufacturing processes and novel data-driven design approaches that take advantage of the freedoms offered by composite materials to generate efficient structural concepts.
The target is to create inherently sustainable composite solutions, able to perform in diverse environments, and made using new scientific advances, with new energy efficient, waste-free manufacturing procedures.
We recently hosted a CDT in Innovation for Sustainable Composites Engineering Start-up meeting with Industrial Partners at the University of Bristol, which created an opportunity for researchers and industry experts to discuss the key targets of the centre and how these will be achieved. It was a successful day with a space for thoughtful conversation welcomed in the break-out group session.
The event targeted the setting up of new research projects with common goals identified such as low-cost tooling to enable high-rate manufacture, in-process NDT, new approaches to acceptance and certification and development of a life cycle assessment tools. Professor Janice Barton remarked “I am pleased that so many of our industrial partners were able to attend and help shape the start of the CDT. The engagement across academia and industry is key to the success of all aspects of the CDT.”
The CDT is strongly supported by the UK composites sector and is a partnership with University of Nottingham, the National Composites Centre, National Physical Laboratory, Henry Royce Institute, and 26 industrial partners representing a diverse range of sectors: Aerospace (Airbus, Rolls-Royce, Dowty, Leonardo, GKN), Defence (QinetiQ, AWE, BAE Systems), Automotive (Gordon Murray, JLR), Wind Energy (Vestas, EDF-Renewables), Marine (Tods), Rail (Network Rail), Oil and Gas (Magma Global), Hydrogen (Luxfer), Material suppliers (Hexcel, Syensco, iCOMAT, SHD), Design and manufacturing companies (Pentaxia, Actuation Lab, LMAT, Carbon ThreeSixty), RTOs (NPL, NCC, Royce, HVMC).
The list is not exclusive; we welcome participation from other companies. If you would like to be involved, please contact composites-institute@bristol.ac.uk