We are stepping into a new era of digitalisation. In this new era machines will communicate and exchange large amounts of data to ensure they can work harmoniously and collaboratively with little human intervention. Current machines use symbolic language to represent the data, but they cannot directly interpret its meaning. As a result, information loss and incorrect interpretation can often happen during communication. To improve manufacturing intelligence, we need the manufacturing system to "understand" the data, which we refer to as "semantics" of the data. If the manufacturing system can be represented at a semantic level, the data will become knowledge to the machine and enable it to be ready for exchange, interrogation and reuse. There is current work taking place to upgrade manufacturing systems to a semantic level but this is still at an early and enabling stage. This fellowship aims to effect a step change in manufacturing intelligence, to support rigorous semantic exchanges between different manufacturing phases, and to allow formalisation and reuse of new/existing knowledge from advanced manufacturing. The proposed research will build a novel semantic infrastructure for advanced manufacturing by supporting knowledge representation, interrogation, reasoning and exchange for smart design, manufacturing and measurement of advanced products. The focus will be on the development of a toolbox to formalise knowledge in/between design, manufacturing and measurement, especially for additive manufacturing (AM). The resulting semantic infrastructure will allow the machine to "interpret" the meaning of the data/information. To be more specific: how the design parameters (geometries, tolerances and materials) are related to each other; how the design parameters relate with the AM process/post process parameters (layer thickness, build orientation); and how the design and process parameters contribute to the measurement details (methods, calibration, etc.). The work will provide a new universal language for any data/information involved in a manufacturing value chain, and will permit a comprehensive infrastructure to digitalise the fast growing AM industry.

HARP2 is a £1.2M consortium that brings together the Universities of Manchester and Huddersfield, as well as a range of industrial project partners, to achieve a technological step-change in the design and application of environmentally-friendly, high-efficiency and fully-integrated waste heat recovery systems for generation of electrical power. This demonstration project will cover three main areas: (i) novel topologies of thermoacoustic engines, coupled with (ii) reciprocating electrical machines using innovative drive/control techniques, and (iii) novel manufacturing technologies to fabricate complex multi-scale objects into compact and robust pressure systems. These have to be optimised for future low-cost and mass-production, and to fit a wide range of potential technological applications, including internal combustion engines for land and marine transportation, micro-CHP (combined heat and power) systems in domestic or small commercial gas/biomass fuelled boilers, railway rolling stock, or industrial process units, to name just a few. To achieve this end, a challenging multi-disciplinary work programme has been developed requiring a close collaboration between research institutions. This must cover aspects of: modelling and experimental validation of thermoacoustic systems, in particular travelling-wave cascade engines optimised for maximum thermal efficiency, building and validating acoustic impedance coupling models between thermoacoustic systems and linear alternators (LAs), developing inexpensive alternator designs and appropriate control strategies for maximum power-point tracking using adaptive acoustic impedance matching, structural analysis for high pressure and fatigue loading, and suitable fabrication protocols in the manufacturing context to ensure the successful integration and packaging of all sub-systems into a working proof-of-concept demonstrator. Six industrial companies, familiar with R&D and product development processes on the academia-industry interface, are supporting the project through their participation in the steering committee - denoted the Industrial Advisory Board (IAB) in the HARP2 programme - and through in-kind contributions of staff time and facilities to provide application-oriented guidance to the project. The companies include British Petroleum Plc, Spirax Sarco Ltd, Ricardo UK Ltd, Ashwell Biomass Ltd, European Thermodynamics Ltd and Reliance Precision Ltd, and are represented in the IAB by their technical leads. The companies cover relevant technical areas, in particular process industries, transport (road/rail/marine) and boiler manufacturers as well as the manufacturing sector. The intention is to grow the membership of the IAB through a mix of public engagement and dissemination activities targeted at industry and policy-makers. This complex research programme aligns directly with the EPSRC "themes" of Energy (improvement in the UK's energy balance by a wider utilisation of waste heat from multiple sources and novel solutions for future renewable technologies), Manufacturing the Future (by devising novel and competitive products and processes and new materials concepts with bespoke properties), and, in an extended way, Global Uncertainties and Living with Environmental Change (by reducing environmental impacts of energy utilisation activities). In particular, it aims to make significant contributions to the future of the UK's energy sector such as (i) unlocking the potential of co-generation and (ii) reduction in CO2 emissions. It is estimated that the technical capacity for cogeneration in the UK will be 40 GWe by 2030, while the technically recoverable heat from industrial processes amounts to 11 TWh/y, corresponding to 2.2 million tonne of CO2 being abated. The HARP2 TAG technology may provide significant contributions to achieving these two goals which makes the research extremely timely.

The vision of the Hub is to create ground-breaking embedded metrology and universal metrology informatics systems to be applied across the manufacturing value chain. This encompasses a paradigm shift in measurement technologies, embedded sensors/instrumentation and metrology solutions. A unified approach to creating new, scientifically-validated measurement technologies in manufacturing will lead to critical underpinning solutions to stimulate significant growth in the UK's productivity and facilitate future factories. Global manufacturing is evolving through disruptive technologies towards a goal of autonomous production, with manufacturing value-chains increasingly digitised. Future factories must be faster, more responsive and closer to customers as manufacturing is driven towards mass customisation of lower-cost products on demand. Metrology is crucial in underpinning quality, productivity and efficiency gains under these new manufacturing paradigms. The Advanced Metrology Hub brings together a multi-disciplinary team from Huddersfield with spokes at Loughborough, Bath and Sheffield universities, with fundamental support from NPL. Expertise in Engineering, Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science will address the grand challenges in advanced metrology and the Hub's vision through two key research themes and parallel platform activities: Theme I - Embedded Metrology will build sound technological foundations by bridging four formidable gaps in process- and component-embedded metrology. This covers: physical limits on the depth of field; high dynamic range measurement; real-time dynamic data acquisition in optical sensor/instruments; and robust, adaptive, scalable models for real-time control systems using sensor networks with different physical properties under time-discontinuous conditions. Theme II - Metrology Data analytics will create a smart knowledge system to unify metrology language, understanding, and usage between design, production and verification for geometrical products manufacturing; Establishment of data analytics systems to extract maximal information from measurement data going beyond state-of-the-art for optimisation of the manufacturing process to include system validation and product monitoring. Platform research activities will underpin the Hub's vision and core research programmes, stimulate new areas of research and support the progression of fundamental and early-stage research towards deployment and impact activities over the Hub's lifetime. In the early stage of the Hub, the core research programme will focus on four categories (Next generation of surface metrology; Metrology technologies and applications; In-process metrology and Machine-tool and large volume metrology) to meet UK industry's strategic agenda and facilitate their new products. The resulting pervasive embedding and integration of manufacturing metrology by the Hub will have far reaching implications for UK manufacturing as maximum improvements in product quality, minimization of waste/rework, and minimum lead-times will ultimately deliver direct productivity benefits and improved competitiveness. These benefits will be achieved by significantly reducing (by 50% to 75%) verification cost across a wide swathe of manufacture sectors (e.g. aerospace, automotive, electronics, energy, medical devices, optics, precision engineering) where the current cost of verification is high (up to 20% of total costs) and where product quality and performance is critical.