Work starts on £30m Aerospace Research Centre
CONSTRUCTION work has begun on the £30m Aerospace Research Centre next to the Manufacturing Technology Centre in Coventry.
The centre, on the MTC’s Ansty Park site, will provide a national facility for aerospace research, allowing MTC engineers to work with experts from the world’s major aerospace companies on potentially ground-breaking projects.
The Department of Business, Innovation and Skills is providing £15.2m of funding for the facility through the Government’s High Value Manufacturing Catapult and the Technology Strategy Board. This investment will be matched by funding from industry.
The research centre will form part of the MTC’s research and development campus which will also include the new Advanced Manufacturing Training Centre. This will tackle manufacturing skills shortages by training manufacturing engineering apprentices on a sponsored or part-sponsored basis, up-skilling manufacturing engineers, and developing graduate engineers and industrial designers.
The aerospace facility is part of a £90m expansion plan for the MTC which opened in 2011. It is a partnership between some of the UK’s major global manufacturers, consultancy TWI and three universities: Birmingham, Nottingham and Loughborough.
MTC chief executive Dr Clive Hickman believes the new Aerospace Research Centre will provide a key hub for leading edge aerospace research in a real manufacturing environment.
“The existing Manufacturing Technology Centre, the Advanced Manufacturing Training Academy and the Aerospace Research Centre, along with other exciting facilities which we will be developing, will provide a world-class environment to develop and demonstrate new technologies and manufacturing processes on an industrial scale in partnership with industry, academia and government,” he said.
