German additive manufacturing (AM) companies EOS and AMCM are forming a partnership with UK’s University of Wolverhampton, the home of the Elite Centre for Manufacturing Skills (ECMS), to develop the UK Centre of Excellence for AM. This new establishment will be situated at the ECMS and is partially subsidized by the UK’s Regional Innovation Fund (RIF).
The RIF, which was announced in October 2023, has a backing of approximately £60 million (~$74.4 million). Its purpose is to encourage innovation in universities that are located in regions with historically low levels of research and development (R&D) investment. The Additive Manufacturing Research Group of the University of Wolverhampton along with Additive Analytics, a spin-off company of that department, will manage a material and process development program at the Centre of Excellence. This Centre is also intended to act as a local AM R&D hub.
The proposal to create a dedicated national AM facility at the University of Wolverhampton is mainly influenced by the UK’s need to catch up with the US in terms of advanced manufacturing abilities. Interestingly, Wolverhampton has twenty years of experience with EOS machines. The AMCM 290 FLX, an EOS M290 device customized with nLIGHT lasers for beam shaping, is one of the new systems that the facility will incorporate.
In a recent public announcement regarding the creation of the UK Centre of Excellence for AM at the University of Wolverhampton, the institute’s director of the ECMS, Professor Arun Arjunan, shared, “The inauguration of the UK Center of Excellence for copper AM heralds a critical point in AM, paving the way for a new phase of innovation, ecological responsibility, and mindful manufacturing. Upcoming projects will delve into the alliance of laser process data with machine learning and AI technologies for efficient material and laser process advancement.”
Expressing his views, Nathan Rawlings, the sales head at EOS UK, stated, “The UK’s manufacturing industry has consistently been progressive and receptive of innovation. AM encompassing materials like copper presents substantial advantages for product engineers, yet they pose challenges for manufacturers. This newly formed Centre of Excellence will conceive and test the mechanisms that will assuredly and consistently bring material benefits into tangible component manufacturing.”
Particularly, the emphasis on copper perhaps presents the most intriguing aspect of this announcement. As I have covered in many articles previously, the UK government is consistently escalating its focus on high-level manufacturing, a pathway that the Centre of Excellence is unequivocally a part of. One significant aspect of this trajectory is the UK government’s stress on ‘critical mineral resilience’, a subject it published detailed research on in December 2023.
Boosting the national copper supply chains with AM could indeed serve as a strong prototype for addressing the kind of issues central to the critical mineral resilience strategy. Along similar lines, the UK and US have also recently collectively banned the import of Russian aluminum, nickel, and copper.
EOS recently unveiled a copper-nickel alloy, contributing to its involvement in the US submarine industrial base program. This project is part of the AUKUS trilateral pact between the US, Australia, and the UK, and it’s highly probable that the influence of the US submarine industrial base’s metal AM advances has extended to the UK.
The featured image is of Orbex’s specially designed AMCM M4K 3D printer.
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