TWI Industrial Members: Innovation Through Collaboration

TWI Industrial Member companies Element Six (UK) Limited and Stirweld are consortium members on the RESURGAM project which won public funding from the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme in 2021 for a three year duration.

Element Six (E6), part of the De Beers Group, is a world leader in the design, development and production of award-winning synthetic diamond, Cubic Boron Nitride and tungsten carbide engineered materials. The company leverages over 70 years of technical expertise and proprietary technology, operating in a wide range of industries and applications, including precision machining, optics, electrochemistry, thermal management, mining and quantum, to name a few. E6 has primary manufacturing sites in the UK, Ireland, Germany, South Africa and the US, and employs over 1,900 people.

Stirweld was founded in 2017 based on friction stir welding (FSW). The company’s mission is to guide their customers, in the automotive, space, aerospace and metal working industries, through discovery and easy implementation of FSW technology, adding value through highly technological products and services.

TWI Industrial Members have the opportunity to participate in a range of project types through their relationship with TWI, one of which is ‘publicly funded projects’. These are enabled by submitting winning proposals, in collaboration with like-minded companies and organisations, to innovation-based programmes such as the EU’s Horizon Europe, and its predecessor Horizon 2020, and the UK’s Innovate UK.

TWI, within its Innovation Network (TWIIN), has a dedicated team, called Technology Innovation Management (TIM), that works closely with SMEs, larger companies and research and technology organisations (RTOs), and brings them together with TWI’s Technical sections, Innovation Centres and Member companies, to prepare project proposals for public funding submissions which are collaborations between the various parties. TIM has a demonstrable track record in this area and, since 2008, has assisted more than 1,000 partners in the UK and internationally to secure over 450 projects, backed by circa £520m of public funding (figures correct as of February 2022).

Objective

To add value to TWI Member companies’ research and development (R&D) activities, thereby contributing to their market positioning, by selecting, and including them in, suitable project proposals to bid for public funding.

Approach

Having first identified that the Horizon 2020 (H2020) EU.3.4. Societal Challenges – Smart, Green and Integrated Transport would be a good fit for TWI and its networks, the TIM team then liaised with TWI’s Technical sections and Innovation Centres to select the MG-3-7-2020 - Improved Production and Maintenance Processes in Shipyards topic as the focus for a collaborative project submission.

Once a project concept had been developed for the topic, in this case by the Joining 4.0 Innovation Centre (J4IC: a partnership between TWI and the University of Lancaster) for RESURGAM: Robotic survey, repair and agile manufacture (see Figure 1.), the TIM team then concentrated its expertise on building a consortium of companies and organisations to work with TWI on the project proposal, which entailed connecting with potential partners who had the required technical and industrial knowledge and expertise to contribute to the project.

The full list of partners making up the RESURGAM consortium, and representing nine different countries, is: the European Federation for Welding, Joining and Cutting (Project Co-ordinator), Aislamientos Termicos De Galicia SA, Asociacion Cluster Del Naval Gallego, Engitec Systems International Limited, Forth Engineering (Cumbria) Ltd, Ned-Project SP Z OO, Technische Universiteit Delft, Turkiye Gemi Insa Sanayicileri Birligi Dernegi, the University of Limerick, Element Six (UK) Limited, Stirweld, and the University of Lancaster and TWI Limited who are strategic partners in the Joining 4.0 Innovation Centre (J4IC).

Solutions

Each consortium member has their own responsibilities within a collaborative project.

On RESURGAM, Element Six is developing FSW tools for joining steel. The tools are made of Polycrystalline Cubic Boron nitride materials which exhibit excellent mechanical and thermal properties at temperatures required for welding steels.

Stirweld will manufacture the CNC welding heads for end users’ existing CNC machines.

FSW, a solid-state welding process, was invented by TWI in 1991 and is widely used for the fabrication of structures requiring high strength, lightweight and fatigue resistant joints.

Under the leadership of Centre Director Darren Williams, J4IC compiled the bid for RESURGAM and funded its writing. On the project itself, J4IC is building a novel digital platform that will incorporate different tools for machine learning, design, information sharing support and more, aimed at connecting the European shipbuilding community and promoting collaborative production engineering. In addition, J4IC will also develop control mechanisms for the FSW bot which is being developed by Fourth Engineering.

The TIM team and TWI’s Advanced Manufacturing Technology (AMT) Group worked closely with Element Six and Stirweld at the consortium forming stage to ensure that the project met their business objectives in both R&D and operational terms, and during the proposal creation stage so that the companies’ respective technologies and experience were integrated smoothly into the bid. The TIM team also managed the end-to-end process of the funding application process, from full development of the technology concept through to submission of the completed proposal to the EU H2020 deadline for the H2020-MG-2020-SingleStage-INEA Call (Innovation action funding scheme).

Benefits and Conclusion

The RESURGAM proposal was successful in securing €5,012,586.13 from the EU (ref. CORDIS Europa EU) for the consortium members to undertake the project.

On completion, RESURGAM will provide industries including marine, ship building (see Figure 2.), offshore energy, and oil and gas, with new, low-cost FSW systems for steel that can be retrofitted to their existing CNC machines, enabled by robotic equipment, processes and qualification routes for fabricating ships and conducting repairs to steel structures using FSW underwater. These capabilities will be backed by secure, digital, Industry 4.0 infrastructure and techniques that will facilitate the rapid, coordinated and distributed modular manufacture of ships and watercraft throughout Europe.

In particular the underwater FSW developed by RESURGAM will transform the way ships hulls are repaired, enabling responsive, remote, at sea repair anywhere in the world, resulting in major advantages in terms of safety, time management and money.

For Element Six and Stirweld, the project will have enabled them, and the other partners, to benefit in a number of ways including: securing public funding to help accelerate their own technology innovation; gaining new technical insights as a result of collaborative working; contributing to new product / system development within their respective industries leading to greater innovation; profile raising arising from project dissemination and recognition; potential new market opportunities arising from the project’s disruptive technologies development; and establishing new industry contacts via joining the RESURGAM consortium.

TWI was delighted to assist Element Six (UK) Limited and Stirweld in joining the RESURGAM project consortium and contributing to the winning bid, and is looking forward to working with them on more new technology concepts in the future.

If you are interested in joining consortia for publicly funded projects, please email: info@twi-innovation-network.com.

RESURGAM received funding from the European Commission's Research and Innovation programme Horizon 2020 under Grant Agreement Nr 101007005.

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