Supporter: National Composites Centre
Author: Alex Conacher
Engineering industries need help to digitise more rapidly and thanks to a new initiative called DETI or help is on its way. The project, Digital Engineering Technology and Innovation, is a two-year research and development programme bringing together industry partners to test out digital technologies on projects, find out what works, what doesn’t and share the findings. The hope is that a digital wave will wash up through the supply chain and industry. “Engineering for me covers the lifecycle of how we develop products, essentially, you start in that collection of requirements, managing those requirements, going through a concept design phase, into the detail phases through into manufacturing, manufacturing, engineering, the verification of products and into service… as that entire lifecycle of how that product has been defined, developed, and actually then how its operating in service,” says Marc Funnell, Head of Digital and director of DETI at the National Composites Centre.
DETI is funded by the West of England Combined Authority and delivered by the National Composites Centre (part of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult) in partnership with the Centre for Modelling & Simulation, the Digital Catapult, the University of the West of England, the University of Bristol, and the University of Bath. The plan is to bring in industry partners – of which they currently have Airbus, GKN Aerospace, Rolls-Royce, CFMS and Siemens, and together work on test projects to rapidly accelerate the digitalisation of engineering. “Digitalisation of that process really focuses on the data that is generated and how we would actually glean intelligence from the data that is created in these parts of the life cycle,” explains Marc. This includes data from early requirements and definition documents, all the way through to operational and performance data. “All of that data is being generated, whether that’s paper or digitally, obviously, you want to move away from paper into digital media, because the ambition on digital engineering is to look at how this data across the lifecycle can be recycled reused and how we draw intelligence from that data so that we can reinform our product definition and redesign our products ultimately, for the better.”
Change needed from inception
Marc says that thedesign phase is where inefficiency begins and that makes it difficult to adjust or correct later on. “It gets very difficult to actually solve some of the change issues. If you make a change later on in the product lifecycle, it becomes very costly, because you’ve got the physical assets and physical factories and machines that you update. But if you’re making changes in the design phase, it makes it a lot easier. “So the digital engineering is about concurrency, not just bringing the people together and making sure that the processes are there,” says Marc “But we can start to use the technology on top of that, to actually bring the intelligence from the data that we collected on manufacturing or in service into that design phase alongside the people and the processes of today. And it’s about connecting those two worlds together.”
The reason this is so important, is the physical nature of manufacturing once you come to build. Think about the tools, the materials – the discarded prototypes littering the floor. The classical story of the inventor is a lonesome figure working late into the night on a labour of love. Discarded prototypes litter the floor all around them, a record of months and years of spent effort. Each flawed in one small detail that made them worthless, as the inventor starts afresh. Each iteration getting closer and closer to the final product. James Dyson, for example, of bagless vacuum cleaner fame. From getting his initial inspiration at a local sawmill, which used cyclone technology to separate sawdust from the air… he claims to have gone through 5,127 prototypes before creating the DC01 – the world’s first bagless vacuum. Today he employs over 10,000 people, all pushing the limits of design in their field. Just imagine the countless design iterations and failed prototypes that his company must generate.
Systems today must be set up to use the data that this iterative design and the process of turning it into reality generates. “Most of the issues that they’re dealing with, they’re not actually because they’re not doing a good job. It’s because the design itself is asking for constraints or parameters or limitations, which cannot necessarily be achieved by that particular centre or that particular machine,” says Marc.
Practical challenges
The aim of the DETI project is to help manufacturing move to concurrent, digitally enhanced business processes and to upskill their people to capitalise on the use of the digital tools. But manufacturing is practical, so let’s take a practical look at the challenges facing the industry.
“The future societal solutions are becoming fundamentally more complex, like a modern-day saloon car, for example, is one of the most complex products in the market its more complex than an Airbus A380, it’s more complex than a satellite,” Bradley Yorke-Biggs, CEO and Professor of Practice at the Institute of Digital Engineering. Bradley has spent 30 years in the automotive sector with most of that time spent working on high performance luxury vehicles at a range of companies. “You know, in terms of what it has to cope with, it’s got over 100 microprocessors and over 100 million lines of code. So very few people understand that how complex actually more than saloon cars one day saloon car is that you many people get into every day.”
Bradley points to a Range Rover as an example. “A new Range Rover programme is about a billion pounds, plus or minus, but roughly 40% of that. So 400 million pounds, is spent on the creation of prototype vehicles, and the testing globally, of those prototype vehicles in three sequential prototype phases, so we engineer something that we think is going to meet the customer needs, and the market needs and the legislative needs, we build it, we spend a lot of money on very expensive prototypes. And then we see how it breaks or how it doesn’t meet the customer aspirations or the legislative needs.”
The team then try and fix any of the breaks or find ways to ensure it meets the wants and needs of customers. “We try and fix it, and we build another set of prototypes. And at every stage, we hope we learn more, find mistakes, refine the product, and get closer to what the market needs.”
This process takes 40% of the overall budget of engineering a new car, and probably around 22 months. And again, this is just a generic model and it consumes a lot of resources, financial as well as natural as cars are flown around the world. “So just one example of how we can accelerate that is how much of the work we do in that physical world, could we move into a high fidelity or appropriate fidelity, digital world?” asks Bradley explaining that another innovation could be around engaging customers using immersive technologies such as, such as virtual reality or augmented reality. This is becoming a more pressing need as customer expectations have evolved, and accelerated. “It used to be okay, we could take five years to develop a car because the market wouldn’t have changed that much,” says Bradley. “When I was an engineer, you could take five years, to think about what the customer wants and what the market needs, look at your competitors set, and engineer a product you think was going to sell in five years, if you did that today, you’d be hugely out in terms of the product you launch onto the market,” he says.
Society and customer needs are shifting at a pace that the industry has never seen before and companies no longer have five years to get a product to market. “We’ve got to get that lifecycle down. So that we can be more assured that it’s the right product to hit the market.”
Again one way of creating that assurance is engaging customers much earlier, using a virtual reality headset to enable customers to interface with the ergonomics that designers are planning for in that future car. The OEM or the supplier can get feedback from the customer that again, brings a level of customer attribute assurance much earlier in the process, reducing the likelihood that companies are going to get it wrong.
Improving communication
Gareth Jones is the engineering and technology director for the Rolls Royce defence business which is working on some concept projects with DETI. “One of them is very much around the, the interface between design and manufacture. So, you know, we, we’re increasingly looking to apply additive layer manufacturing processes in, in our products.”
Otherwise known as 3D printing. “It will allow us to design components in different ways than we historically have done. So when you bring along a new manufacturing process, and additive layer manufacturing, or ALM, is basically 3d printing in metal, then, you know, it opens up the design space, it takes away some of the constraints or restrictions that designers will have historically had,” says Jones. “And so, one of the projects, as I was saying, is really looking at so how do we make sure that we maximise the benefit by having the best possible connection between what the design engineer wants to achieve and what the manufacturing process can enable and having that you know that that data connection between the two and so that we design within the process capability but right up on its on its edges without going over or staying too far back.”
The second project relates to how data is shared with the supply chain in a way that allows them to accelerate the main manufacturer’s verification process and the implications of this stretch further.
“The ability to share data in, you know, in near real time essentially between us as a company in the supply chain means that the whole process can be accelerated, and that data is everything from manufacturing definition, down to the future scheduling of the volumes that we want,” says Gareth.
This interconnection might once have been transmitted by letter, then later on, it might have been transmitted by fax, then it will have been transmitted by email. “And now, you can progressively see how actually, you get to the point where each other’s executive systems are talking to one another. And that transmission is, is as good as automated, you know, within, within some particular constraints or bounds that both entities are happy with,” says Gareth.
Here’s Bradley again, who sees digitalisation of manufacturing not just as essential… but an actual race. “My personal belief is, when we wake up on January 1st, 2021, we will not just move forward by one year, we will actually move forward by five years. I genuinely think COVID will probably have accelerated our hunger for new societal solutions to many of the challenges we’re facing in many sectors, whether it be mobility, whether it be air travel, whether it be energy, and I think the challenge for the UK will be how do we react faster than any other nation in the world that is going to see the same dynamic how do we make sure that we get out the blocks fast to develop what society is now hungry for faster than anybody else?”
A new space race
And the challenges, as Bradley sees them, begin with understanding what is happening all over the world. “I’m still having many conversations where people don’t understand what I’ve just been saying that this is a race. This is the new space race is creating future mobility solutions for the automotive industry.”
What is needed is an awakening and then a cultural transformation to ensure that OEMs in the UK stay relevant. “So I think it’s an understanding of the challenge that we’ve got to use digital science and technology and deploy it in, in our manufacturing industries, just like we’ve seen great success in banking, with FinTech and Pharma.”
What is more Bradley sees this as a cross-sector challenge with support from government to break down barriers. “In many cases, it’s not anything one company themselves can fix. So therefore, we are suggesting it needs a level of central intervention from governments to drive the creation of some of these new capabilities and ensure that we do take a cross sector approach. And again, coming back to DETI. I think that’s one of the challenges that DETI will have, because naturally, each of those sectors likes to develop stuff, the write down is that we understand what automotive is, so we’ll just go fix it ourselves. Because all is quite hard work, working out what other sectors are doing and understanding it.”
Bradley says that the first step is for government to articulate the importance of manufacturing to the UK, and that more must be done, but initiatives such as DETI are a good start. From Marc’s perspective it is about efficiency. “We need to be more effective and efficient in the way we bring new product to market, essentially, you know, we all I’m very keen on Net Zero sustainability and our ability to make sure that the products of the future, for my kids, ultimately are not going to detrimentally affect their, their way of living,” says Marc. “And at the moment, it’s very conscious that it takes a very long time, I’ve come from an aerospace background, it takes a very long time for us to introduce a new product to market. And so, the speed and cost by which we do these things need to be rapidly improved, made way better than what it is more effective than what it is today.”
Machine learning and IoT critical
Marc says that for him, he is most excited about getting information from machines. “Both to interface with them, and interact with them,” he says. “And using that information in such a way that it automatically or actively adjusts your thinking, when you go into product design. I think that’s really exciting.”
Machine intelligence is most valuable in this area when it is used to digest vast amounts of information and present them usefully, and as needed instead of needed to read 500 page manuals. “It actually allows the computers and allow the artificial intelligence solutions of the machines to actually tell me when I design something, that no, I can’t manufacture that, or by doing that you’re causing this problem, and you’re gonna have to try and resolve it this way.”
It’s about starting to engage as a designer with machines, factories, and manufacturing solutions in a new way and being more agile in the approach by which we utilise this data. Marc says we need to figure out a mechanism to be more concurrent, to start to produce products in a way more efficient and effective fashion. And there are tools in the market today, but not as prevalent as they could be.
“We can’t really move forward unless we can start to bring some intelligence from not just manufacturing but also, we’re going to be putting devices onto products too. So what does the product in service actually say about what I thought it would do?”
What is crucial is the ability to bring that information from what’s actually happening reacting to reality, as well as the managing intelligence of the machines back into design. “And that’s really where engineering should be playing a big part is re-engineering products, products that are better, products that perform better, more effective, more sustainable for future generations, and how do we actually go about making sure this happens.”
All of this comes back to the data itself. “All of it relies heavily on us being able to get data from other products working, get data from how the manufacturing systems working, and gain the intelligence from that data, so that we can actually make big differences in both in efficiency improvements, as well as bringing products faster to market, essentially,” says Marc. “So we can benefit for sustainability and our Net Zero agenda, as well as potentially making our businesses way more resilient. In the future, essentially, that’s what really excites me about bringing digital into the holistic engineering process.”
Special thanks to the National Composites Centre, Rolls Royce and the Institute of Digital Engineering.
If your company would like to get involved with DETI, to avail itself of the resources at the NCC – for example the UK’s strategic 5G test bed… or just for more information, please check our show notes for the relevant link.
For more information about DETI and if you’re interested in collaborating on DETI visit www.deti.uk or email deti@nccuk.com
