Industry partner workshop - helping to shape MAPP’s future research programme

Our investigators came together with industry and High Value Manufacturing (HMV) Catapult partners in November to shape MAPP’s research programme over the next few years. 

We’ve worked closely with our industry partners throughout MAPP’s development.

Our partners have articulated a number of challenges which required a programme of fundamental manufacturing research to solve: the variability of input material and process outcomes, the lack of explicit process understanding, the absence of suitable real-time modelling, no direct link from processing to in-service performance, and the skills gap.

The first years of MAPP have been focused on establishing the tools and technologies to answer these challenges and developing the interdisciplinary teams across the six academic institutions. 

As we move towards MAPP’s midterm point we are starting to realise early indicators of MAPP’s vision.

As we move towards demonstrating ‘right first time’ manufacturing, we are extending the tools and technologies we have developed - e.g. advanced metrology and machine learning approaches - and applying these to new challenges such as the prediction of in-service performance for components manufactured by advanced powder processes.

In parallel, we are working with industry partners to apply tools and technologies to their specific manufacturing challenges via aligned projects such as MIRIAM, AIRLIFT and DAM. 

At the November workshop, we gave industry partners an overview of what we have achieved and our plans for the next two years of the programme.

Industry partners gave us valuable feedback on these plans which we are now incorporating into a new research strategy which we will share in 2020.