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PTC gives IoT Now a glimpse inside AMRC’s Factory 2050

November 17, 2017

Posted by: Zenobia Hegde

The UK’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) was formed in 2001 as a cooperative initiative between the University of Sheffield and Boeing. With Boeing having a requirement to provide work back into the UK following a Ministry of Defence order for both Apache attack helicopters and C17 cargo aircraft, the aerospace giant discovered that it could meet its requirements more efficiently by funding research and development rather than pure employment.

Established on the site of the Orgreave coking works in 2001, AMRC has since grown, expanded and become one of the UK’s (arguably the world’s) leading centres for advanced research into a wide variety of manufacturing processes.

Today, the AMRC campus spreads across the former industrial wasteland and encompasses a huge range of research, from composites to machining, from casting to additive manufacturing and all points in between.

The site is also attracting some big names in manufacturing, companies looking to advance their production initiatives. Boeing is building its first European production plant nearby. Supercar manufacturer, McLaren Automotive, are also in the final throes of building its new production facility next door. No surprise that both of these companies along with 105 others, are partnered with the ARMC, all of whom fund both specific research projects to solve their own challenges, but also contribute to general interest research that’s made available to all.

According to AMRC’s chief technology officer, Stuart Dawson, “The mission of the AMRC is to help improve the competitiveness of our members and we have a very good track record of achieving that. By applying these technologies and transferring them into industry, we’ve helped to secure UK jobs, attracted in investment and help companies perform more efficiently.”

Examples of how AMRC’s work has achieved this are widely available and widely documented. From its work to help Rolls Royce reduce cost of manufacturing rotor disks on its Trent engine and keep production in the UK (resulting in a new factory in Sunderland) to its work to assist McLaren bring the production of its carbonfibre tubs to the UK from Austria to help the automotive master achieved it’s production goals in the next year years.

Enter Factory 2050

In the 16 years since its establishment, the AMRC has grown to cover not only machining and composites, but casting, nuclear research as well as training and apprentice-focused activities, its newest initiative, Factory 2050, looks to combine this wealth of research and experience to present its vision for how the factory will look in 2050.

Factory 2050 is a new build on the site of the old Sheffield city airport and the Bond Byran-designed facility opens up the production process of the future in a circular building, surrounded by glass.

While many might expect advanced manufacturing research to be conducted behind closed doors and keycard security, it’s clear that Factory 2050 is meant to show off what the future of manufacturing is going to look like and make it not only accessible, but attracted for the future generations. But aesthetics and access aside, what are the teams and partners involved in the activity in this space looking to achieve?

According to Dawson, “Factory 2050 is meant to represent what we believe manufacturing needs to be like, to be competitive, in the year 2050; moving away from traditional, mono-tasking, fixed assets to a very flexible work environment that’s digitally enabled. A factory that could take on products and industries with minimum expense – re-configurable, flexible and digitally led.”

Four technology pillars of Factory 2050

Factory 2050 has four cornerstone technologies that its team and partners are focused on to enable this vision to come to life.

Robotics and Automation is prevalent wherever you go. The team’s focus is to move away from expensive, high-value, specialist automation equipment to take advantage of the wealth of lower-cost, general purpose robotic equipment now available. Each demonstration cell includes some form of robotics, from the high accuracy counter sinking operations on Joint Strike Fighter wing skins (which incidentally reduced capital investment for Boeing from £72 million (€81.03 million) to just £2 million (€2.25 million) to the use of smaller scale robots to assist a small family-run Sheffield company to fix their issues with an ageing workforce and find more efficient way to finish its specialist construction products.

Another focal point is the use of integrated large volume metrology. This takes advantage of a wealth of measurement tools now available to assist with a wide range of tasks, to increase accuracy and to ensure that large scale products can be completed in time (reducing rework, by using in process metrology) and in tolerance.

Related to metrology is the use of digitally assisted assembly techniques. Here, a combination of smart products, smart assembly lines and a wealth of IoT enabled projects are looking to enable assembly lines to become not only more productive, but also more flexible. If data analytics can be used in combination with smart assembly tools as well as augmented reality display, it’s possible to have human operators become adept at switching complex tasks as their robotic counter parts.

One such example had a production cell, linked using PTC’s ThingWorx platform, to guide the worker not only through the process of ensuring they had all of the parts required to build a custom product (using IoT techniques along with smart parts racking and picking) but also guide them through assembly, feeding required torque information to a connected assembly tool direct from assembly work instructions

The four pillar technology is Manufacturing Informatics. If there’s an overriding theme for Factory 2050, it’s the capture and reuse of data. Much of this is driven by machine level sensors, feed into an IoT backbone (built on Thingworx, no surprise given PTC’s tier 1 partnership) and ensure that the most is made of that data – whether that’s to assist capturing real time manufacturing information or feeding real time usage statistics and metrics to service engineers using an augmented reality headset.

Factory 2050 is exploring the full spectrum of potential for the connecting factory, whether that’s using IoT data fed to assist with production and assembly or using cutting edge technology to breath life into legacy equipment to allow venerable, and often manual, machine tools to participate and provide valuable information in the connected age.

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