• Status: Completed
  • Funder: Innovate UK
  • Project costs: £1,427,215
  • Funded value: £725,001
  • Funding period: November 2013 - October 2016
  • Organisations: University of Sheffield, Farapack Polymers, Xaar, Unilever, Cobham, BAE Systems, Sebastian Conran Associates and Loughborough University

This project will develop supply chain and full scale production capabilities for novel Additive Manufacturing Technologies based on laser sintering (LS) and high speed sintering (HSS) for application in three major industrial sectors within the UK economy. These include Fast Moving Consumer Goods (Unilever), Aerospace (BAE Systems) and Space (Cobham Technical Services).

The manufacturing capability owned by Loughborough University will be developed and exploited by the consortium partners that comprise in addition to end-users, manufacturing machine capability developers (Xaar), product design speciality (Sebastian Conran Associates) and polymer processing and additive manufacturing specialists (Farapack Polymers Ltd) based at the University of Sheffield. The project will deliver a validated supply chain with suitable demonstrator products in multiple industry sectors and an appropriate exploitation plan for effective commercialisation of LS and HSS.