Our Early Career Enterprise Fellows, James Uzzell and James Griffith were fine ambassadors for BCI at the 2024 Festival of Enterprise. Both delivered excellent presentations with aplomb to an expert panel of judges and answered questions on their work.
Judging was extremely tight and both were highly commended; James Griffith being a narrow second in the panel judgement but won the audience vote and prize for the most engaging presentation titled “Developing Composite Solutions for Cryogenic Liquid Hydrogen Fuel Storage on Zero Carbon Emission Aviation (Developing Materials for Net-Zero Flight).”
James Uzzell’s presentation was focused on dynamic induction coils for energy efficient composites manufacturing.
The event, which was held in the Bill Brown Design Suite within the Faculty of Engineering on Thursday 20 June, focused on showcasing the range of research and enterprise activities, the people that have been supported and the impact of the funding and training provided by the University Enterprise Fellowships (UEFs) and Early Career Enterprise Fellowships (ECEFs).
The event featured presentations by the 23/24 Cohort of UEFs, and a series of PechaKucha style presentations by our ECEFs with an expert panel of judges who awarded the prize for best presentation with regards to project outcome & impact, in addition to an audience vote and prize for the most engaging presentation on the day.
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.
Dr Lee Harper from the University of Nottingham presents the key points of the research programme
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.
Attendees were encouraged to discuss thoughts and ideas in the afternoon break-out session
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
We are proud to announce that PhD student Nicolas DARRAS has won the 2024 SAMPE UK & Ireland Student Seminar Competition, alongside Badr Moutik from University of Plymouth.
Nic’s presentation titled “Investigation on the manufacture of hierarchical composites and their mechanical compressive performances” impressed the judges and a result he will be representing SAMPE UK at the SAMPE Europe competition (part of the SAMPE Europe conference taking place in Belfast in September).
Nic said “Participating in the SAMPE Student Seminar competition was a tremendous experience, allowing me to enhance my presentation skills and shine a light on the novel research within the NextCOMP programme. As one of the UK representatives, I eagerly anticipate the SAMPE Europe conference in September, where I’m excited to showcase our innovative projects on an international stage.”
Tim Wybrow, SAMPE UKIC Chairman, said, “I am really impressed with all the student researchers this year. We have decided as a committee that as a congratulations and thank you for their efforts, each participant will be offered a complimentary one-year membership to the organisation.”
Bristol Composites Institute’s (BCI) Research Associate, Yi Wang attended the 12th Asian-Australasian Conference on Composite Materials (ACCM12) in Hangzhou, China from the 25th to the 28th of April. Yi won the Young Researcher Award for his talk entitled “An automated workflow for composites part manufacturability prediction and tooling optimisation”. Yi was presented the award by BCI’s founder and former director Professor Michael Wisnom who also attended the conference.
Yi has been a member of our process simulation team for a number of years working originally as a PhD student within the EPSRC SIMPROCS platform grant before becoming a Research Associate working on the same project. He now works on our latest EPSRC grant: Composites: Made Faster. Yi’s talk presented the outputs from our work on the research program DETI led by the National Composites Centre (NCC) and funded by the West of England Authority. This research developed, at an industrial scale, an automated workflow for the prediction of manufacturing-induced defects in autoclave-moulded thick composite parts. It builds on the robust consolidation model and homogenisation approach developed at BCI in the last 10 years.
The work also laid the foundation to conduct data-driven optimisation of caul plate geometries for reduced geometrical deviation from part design. Wide adoption of these tools could allow saving industry a considerable amount of time and money by removing a large number of the many physical trials that are currently an integral part of any composite part manufacturing process development.
Yi’s supervisors Dr Jonathan Belnoue and Professor Stephen Hallett said: “Congratulations to Yi for this achievement. Yi is a very important member of the team who brings great enthusiasm to anything he puts his hand to. A very well-deserved award! This is also great recognition of the quality of BCI process simulation work that has advanced considerably over the last 10 years”.
Congratulations to Mengzhou Yang and Wenfei Ji from the Bristol Composites Institute and the School of Chemistry of the University of Bristol for jointly winning the Best Student Presentation prize at the Multiscale Innovative Materials and Structures conference in Cetara. Mengzhou has presented the paper: “Numerical and experimental study of non-rigid foldable Origami bellows”, while Wenfei has described her work in: “Preparation of nanoclay/polymer coating for flexible polyurethane foam and the improvement of mechanical performance”.
Mengzhou is mainly supervised by Mark Schenk, Wenfei by Jeroen van Duijneveldt and Wuge Briscoe. Fabrizio Scarpa is co-supervisor of both students. The Bristol Composites Institute was well represented in the conference, with other presentations made by Xindi Yu, Keyao Song and Gianni C. on novel tensegrity structures, beetle elytra and Tesla valve acoustic metamaterials. The work of the students has been supported by China Scholarship Council, UKRI and European Research Council (ERC). Special thanks go to the University of Bristol Engineering and Faculty of Sciences of the University for the further support provided to the students. MIMS22 has been an excellent conference showcasing top speakers in the field of metamaterials and architected materials.
Rafael Ruiz Iglesias, a PhD student in Bristol Composites Institute supervised by Professors Janice Barton and Ole Thomsen, and Dr Geir Olafsson has received the British Society for Strain Measurement (BSSM), Young Stress Analyst prize. The competition, which is sponsored by Airbus, involves writing a 1000 word summary of the applicants project. The project summaries are ranked by a panel of experts in Experimental Mechanics and the top four applicants are invited to present their work at the BSSM Annual Conference which took place in Oxford at St Anne’s college. The competition is open internationally and the other three finalists came from Netherlands, Portugal and UK Industry.
Rafa’s presentation entitled “Subsurface Damage Assessment in Composite Laminates Using a Novel Full Field Imaging Technique” which is part CerTest, a 5 year multidisciplinary project, is aligned to the EPSRC funded Programme Grant Certification for Design . Each finalist was allowed 15 minutes for their presentation followed by five minutes of intense questioning; there were over 100 delegates in the audience. Rafa’s presentation was extremely visual and engaging, which the judges appreciated and placed his work first.
The outcome of the competition was announced at the conference gala dinner, which provided a very nice end to the evening with Rafa receiving first prize.
