Subscribe to our newsletter to receive the latest news and events from TWI:

Subscribe >

Accelerating digital manufacturing development

TWI and Lancaster University have established the Joining 4.0 Innovation Centre (J4IC), which was created to accelerate the development and adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies within the joining context.

The new centre will leverage both organisations’ strong research bases and will enable greater adoption of innovation through close interaction with TWI’s network of 700+ Industrial Members.

J4IC will focus on ‘joining’ technologies in the context of Industry 4.0 based upon a holistic approach to the overall development challenges – ie the integration of advanced manufacturing techniques and systems, software platforms, intelligent computation, and overall systems connectivity, to enable smart, connected, and digital based manufacturing solutions.

The new centre aims to establish an excellent research environment, supported by PhD researchers and academic staff embedded with industry, and securing research funding from public funding bodies such as H2020 and Innovate UK, in order to support the research and development ambitions of the partners.

J4IC will compliment and strengthen TWI’s current offering within the digital space delivered through the Welding Systems Integration team, which recently won an award for ‘Outstanding Ecosystem Design Using CurateFx’.

CurateFx is TM Forum’s cloud-based enterprise software service for ecosystem and digital transformation projects.

The catalyst project team used CurateFX to develop a logical factory concept platform, supported by Industry 4.0 values, which digitally connected and integrated numerous manufacturing systems across disparate facilities.

Offering centralised control of processes in different factories, the project demonstrated real-time control of processes, better forecasting of demand and slack time, online remote tracking, better overall capacity management, and increased competitiveness by providing member quotations faster, and with greater accuracy.

For more information, please email contactus@twi.co.uk.

Avatar Christopher Dungey Director of the Joining 4.0 Innovation Centre

Professor Christopher Dungey is the Director of the Joining 4.0 Innovation Centre (J4IC). Chris holds both a PhD and a 1st Class MEng (Hons) in Materials Engineering, from Birmingham University as well as a MBA (PG Cert) from the Open University. He has specialist expertise in welding and joining based manufacturing systems from both an aerospace (solid welding processes, titanium alloys, ceramic materials) and automotive (solid state welding, constant velocity joint manufacture, ferrous alloys) technologies perspective. Previously he has held a number of senior research positions at TWI including: Technology Manager, Senior Research Engineer and Principal Project Leader. Chris has also held previous positions at the UK Manufacturing Technology Centre (Manufacturing Technology Centre, part of the UK High Value Manufacturing Catapult network) as Technology Manager – High Integrity Fabrication, Rolls Royce Plc. (Manufacturing Engineer and Team Leader for Solid State welding Capability Acquisition) and GKN Defence and Automotive (Fatigue Engineer and Metallurgical Engineer).

Media /

Related Insights

View all insights
}