Globally, national infrastructure is facing significant challenges: - Ageing assets: Much of the UK's existing infrastructure is old and no longer fit for purpose. In its State of the Nation Infrastructure 2014 report the Institution of Civil Engineers stated that none of the sectors analysed were "fit for the future" and only one sector was "adequate for now". The need to future-proof existing and new infrastructure is of paramount importance and has become a constant theme in industry documents, seminars, workshops and discussions. - Increased loading: Existing infrastructure is challenged by the need to increase load and usage - be that number of passengers carried, numbers of vehicles or volume of water used - and the requirement to maintain the existing infrastructure while operating at current capacity. - Changing climate: projections for increasing numbers and severity of extreme weather events mean that our infrastructure will need to be more resilient in the future. These challenges require innovation to address them. However, in the infrastructure and construction industries tight operating margins, industry segmentation and strong emphasis on safety and reliability create barriers to introducing innovation into industry practice. CSIC is an Innovation and Knowledge Centre funded by EPSRC and Innovate UK to help address this market failure, by translating world leading research into industry implementation, working with more than 40 industry partners to develop, trial, provide and deliver high-quality, low cost, accurate sensor technologies and predictive tools which enable new ways of monitoring how infrastructure behaves during construction and asset operation, providing a whole-life approach to achieving sustainability in an integrated way. It provides training and access for industry to source, develop and deliver these new approaches to stimulate business and encourage economic growth, improving the management of the nation's infrastructure and construction industry. Our collaborative approach, bringing together leaders from industry and academia, accelerates the commercial development of emerging technologies, and promotes knowledge transfer and industry implementation to shape the future of infrastructure. Phase 2 funding will enable CSIC to address specific challenges remaining to implementation of smart infrastructure solutions. Over the next five years, to overcome these barriers and create a self-sustaining market in smart infrastructure, CSIC along with an expanded group of industry and academic partners will: - Create the complete, innovative solutions that the sector needs by integrating the components of smart infrastructure into systems approaches, bringing together sensor data and asset management decisions to improve whole life management of assets and city scale infrastructure planning; spin-in technology where necessary, to allow demonstration of smart technology in an integrated manner. - Continue to build industry confidence by working closely with partners to demonstrate and deploy new smart infrastructure solutions on live infrastructure projects. Develop projects on behalf of industry using seed-funds to fund hardware and consumables, and demonstrate capability. - Generate a compelling business case for smart infrastructure solutions together with asset owners and government organisations based on combining smarter information with whole life value models for infrastructure assets. Focus on value-driven messaging around the whole system business case for why smart infrastructure is the future, and will strive to turn today's intangibles into business drivers for the future. - Facilitate the development and expansion of the supply chain through extending our network of partners in new areas, knowledge transfer, smart infrastructure standards and influencing policy.

Advanced composite materials consist of reinforcement fibres, usually carbon or glass, embedded within a matrix, usually a polymer, providing a structural material. They are very attractive to a number of user sectors, in particular transportation due to their combination of low weight and excellent material properties which can be tailored to specific applications. Components are typically manufactured either by depositing fibres into a mould and then infusing with resin (liquid moulding) or by forming and consolidation of pre-impregnated fibres (prepreg processing). The current UK composites sector has a value of £1.5 billion and is projected to grow to over £4 billion by 2020, and to between £6 billion and £12 billion by 2030. This range depends on the ability of the industry to deliver structures at required volumes and quality levels demanded by its target applications. Much of this potential growth is associated with next generation single-aisle aircraft, light-weighting of vehicles to reduce fuel consumption, and large, lightweight and durable structures for renewable energy and civil infrastructure. The benefits of lightweight composites are clear, and growth in their use would have a significant impact on both the UK's climate change and infrastructure targets, in addition to a direct impact on the economy through jobs and exports. However the challenges that must be overcome to achieve this growth are significant. For example, BMW currently manufacture around 20,000 i3 vehicles per year with significant composites content. To replace mass produced vehicles this production volume would need to increase by up to 100-times. Airbus and Boeing each produce around 10 aircraft per month (A350 and 787 respectively) with high proportions of composite materials. The next generation single aisle aircraft are likely to require volumes of 60 per month. Production costs are high relative to those associated with other materials, and will need to reduce by an order of magnitude to enable such growth levels. The Future Composites Manufacturing Hub will enable a step change in manufacturing with advanced polymer composite materials. The Hub will be led by the University of Nottingham and University of Bristol; with initial research Spokes at Cranfield, Imperial College, Manchester and Southampton; Innovation Spokes at the National Composites Centre (NCC), Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC), Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC) and Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG); and backed by 18 leading companies from the composites sector. Between the Hub, Spokes and industrial partners we will offer a minimum of £12.7 million in additional support to deliver our objectives. Building on the success of the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Composites (CIMComp), the Hub will drive the development of automated manufacturing technologies that deliver components and structures for demanding applications, particularly in the aerospace, transportation, construction and energy sectors. Over a seven year period, the Hub will underpin the growth potential of the sector, by developing the underlying processing science and technology to enable Moore's law for composites: a doubling in production capability every two years. To achieve our vision we will address a number of research priorities, identified in collaboration with industry partners and the broader community, including: high rate deposition and rapid processing technologies; design for manufacture via validated simulation; manufacturing for multifunctional composites and integrated structures; inspection and in-process evaluation; recycling and re-use. Matching these priorities with UK capability, we have identified the following Grand Challenges, around which we will conduct a series of Feasibility Studies and Core Projects: -Enhance process robustness via understanding of process science -Develop high rate processing technologies for high quality structures

The proposed research programme will attempt to create self-reconfiguring manufacturing systems that are based on intelligent and highly accurate models of manufacturing processes and the products being manufactured. The goal of the research is to enable a radical change in manufacturing effectiveness and sustainability. The target type of manufacturing is component-based modular reconfigurable systems, i.e. systems that are built up of various elements and assembled together, in a similar fashion to building with 'lego'. This is a class of manufacturing system that is typically used in assembly and handling applications, where you tend to find families of modular machine components that can be reused and reconfigured as the product, and hence production processes change. Major applications for this are in the automotive and aerospace sectors. One example is in powertrain assembly, as seen in the UK at Ford. If the re-configurability of such production systems can be enhanced, Ford estimate that potential savings of over 30% in costs are achievable with a target of a 50% reduction in the time to build and commission such a system that typically costs £30 million per engine line. The realisation of this research has the potential to help enable the retention of high value engineering activity in the UK by improving the competiveness in the engineering of reconfigurable manufacturing systems. The capability to achieve this aim is to be built on the foundation of current, internationally leading research at Loughborough University, which has created a method for building reconfigurable systems from reusable components that is currently being adopted in automotive supply chains. The concepts of flexible and reconfigurable manufacturing systems are well established; however problems still exist in the effective, efficient, rapid, configuration of such flexible systems, particularly as lifecycle product changes occur, whether such changes are minor or more fundamental. Many flexible and reconfigurable system examples exist. However, most are designed intuitively and a systematic methodology is still lacking. Additionally, engineering this integration of product and processes is essential in a lifecycle context across the supply-chain, yet this remains largely unaddressed. Virtual engineering also has a major role to play in that we can simulate production systems and products. However the effectiveness of such simulation design tools for reconfigurable systems remains poor. Such tools need to be able to encompass the full system lifetime and be able to replicate the functions of the production system exactly in the models. These models are key enablers for understanding what might happen throughout a production system's lifecycle and can drive better configuration of the modular manufacturing systems we aspire to create.

The aim of this project is to explore the use of laser-generated ultrasound in thermosonic (TS) bonding. TS bonding is a joining technique which uses a combination of heat, pressure and ultrasonic energy to facilitate the formation of strong metal-metal bonds. It is used mainly for attaching bond wires to silicon chips inside their packages, where it offers a number of advantages over other joining methods. For example, it involves no additional materials (e.g. solders or adhesives), and it can be carried out at lower temperature and pressure than thermo-compression bonding and lower ultrasonic power than pure ultrasonic welding. An important potential application for TS bonding is flip chip assembly, a technique used in advanced electronics manufacturing. Flip chip allows unpackaged integrated circuits to be attached to a circuit board or other substrate in a face-down configuration, with electrical connections between the contact pads on the chip and the substrate being provided by conducting "bumps". Flip chip assembly offers several advantages over other chip attachment methods, such as higher electrical performance, higher interconnect density (more electrical connections per unit area), smaller footprint and lower height. Flip chip processes based on solder attachment have been established for many years. However, with the continual drive for miniaturization they are approaching their limits in terms of interconnect density. Alternative approaches based on adhesive bonding are scalable to finer interconnect pitches, but do not achieve the performance or reliability required for many applications. TS bonding could form the basis of a highly reliable, ultra-fine-pitch flip chip technology. However, up to now it has proved challenging to develop robust processes, mainly because it is highly sensitive to co-planarity errors and bump height variations which can lead to bond strength non-uniformity and even damage to the chip. These issues become more severe as the chip size increases, and consequently TS flip chip has been limited to a narrow range of applications involving small devices with low interconnect count. We propose to develop a TS bonding process in which pulsed laser light is used to generate ultrasound locally at specific bonding sites, using confined ablation of a sacrificial carrier tape sandwiched between the workpiece and a transparent bond head. This approach will enable us to deliver the ultrasonic energy in a flexible manner, allowing for the possibility of compensating for co-planarity and bump height errors. With the proposed system it will also be possible to pre-heat the interface locally by laser, yielding a process with very low overall thermal loading. If successful, the proposed research will ultimately lead to a next generation flip chip technology with wide ranging applications in electronics manufacturing. The new process should also find applications in other fields such as MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) and optoelectronics where joining of delicate components is required.

Power Electronic Converters are key elements in many safety-critical, high-reliability, electrical systems working in uncertain and harsh environments. Examples include aerospace power supplies and servo converters, marine propulsion and traction drives, and offshore renewable energy generator systems. The traditional approaches to achieve high converter reliability are to de-rate the semiconductor devices and to include redundancy in the system configuration. These approaches can increase the Mean Time Between Failures of converters but will not prevent a catastrophic failure from happening. The aim of this research is to develop a new approach of monitoring the converter device degradation over a period of time and provide the ability to predict failures before they happen. The research will address the challenges of carrying out and understanding the results of key measurements in order to derive information about the internal state of the semiconductor devices in real-time operating conditions. The mechanisms leading to the aging and failure of the devices will be investigated, and a relationship between the device condition and its terminal characteristics established. Condition monitoring techniques will be based on converter terminal electrical signals, which are interpreted together with information about the thermal and load conditions of the converter system. Experiment, and computer modelling and simulation in the thermal, low frequency and high frequency electrical domains will be carried out to develop the condition monitoring techniques. The results will be valuable to device manufacturers, manufacturers of power electronic converters, and to the end users of such systems, particularly in critical applications.