Cranfield IMRC

Cranfield's Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre (IMRC)is a EPSRC funded centre undertaking research that addresses many of the issues identified in the Government’s recent High Value Manufacturing strategy.

Research Themes

The IMRC has two main research themes, Manufacturing Technology and Product-Service Systems (PSS), which provide leadership and support to both academia and industry in their areas of expertise. Manufacturing Technology focuses on precision technologies, welding and composites manufacture. Product-Service Systems examine how organisations innovate capabilities and processes to design and build more integrated product and service offerings.

The Cranfield IMRC outputs have been used to inform and support the new Government manufacturing strategy.

Manufacturing Technology

Manufacturing Technology focuses on developing a research activity that supports high added value UK manufacturing. Main research activities include:

• Precision Technologies – Precision machining including high efficiency machining, ion beam
  Ion beam
  An ion beam is a type of charged particle beam consisting of ions. Ion beams have many uses in electronics manufacturing and other industries. A variety of ion beam sources exist, some derived from the mercury vapor thrusters developed by NASA in the 1960s.-Ion beam etching or sputtering:One type...
  
   and plasma processes, machine tool design, microengineering and metrology.

• Metal Processing – Welding
  Welding
  Welding is a fabrication or sculptural process that joins materials, usually metals or thermoplastics, by causing coalescence. This is often done by melting the workpieces and adding a filler material to form a pool of molten material that cools to become a strong joint, with pressure sometimes...
  
  , laser processing, additive manufacturing
  Additive manufacturing
  Additive manufacturing is defined by ASTM as the "process of joining materials to make objects from 3D model data, usually layer upon layer, as opposed to subtractive manufacturing methodologies, such as traditional machining...
  
  , stress engineering, and process modelling

• Composite Processing - Low cost manufacture, high performance lightweight materials, powder processing, nanocomposites and hybridised structures

Product-Service Systems

Product-Service Systems (PSS) are market bundles of customer focused products, services, support, self-service and knowledge development in order to increase the value of core offerings. Cranfield IMRC is working with manufacturers to develop competitive PSS offerings. PSS research projects include:

• Assessing the value created by Product-Service Systems
• apability based PSS conceptual design
• Operations: Operations strategies to deliver product-service systems
• Networks for Product-Service Systems
• Transformation to servitized organisational forms

External links

• Cranfield IMRC
• EPSRC
• High Value Manufacturing strategy