The new £40 million hub, based at the University of Huddersfield, is intended to play a crucial role in what has been dubbed the Fourth Industrial Revolution, providing support for metrology in manufacturing where firms are demanding much greater accuracy and efficiency in increasingly complex and automated production processes.
The seven-year Future Metrology Hub, which receives £10 million from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, with extra funding from universities and business partners, was officially launched at an event attended by more than 130 scientists, engineers, academics and industrialists from around the UK.
The Hub’s Director, Professor Dame Xiangqian (Jane) Jiang, said that metrology is critical to modern manufacturing and pledged that the technology she and her colleagues develop in the lab – such as sensors and artificial intelligence control systems – would be geared up for use in the real world of industry.
Professor Jiang stressed the need for inter-disciplinary collaboration across a wide range of sectors.“That is what the Hub is all about,” she said, and added that its goal was a transformation in UK manufacturing performance.
The University of Huddersfield is at the centre of the Future Metrology Hub. Its “spokes” are at the universities of Sheffield, Bath and Loughborough, which will contribute research in specialised areas.
The National Physical Laboratory, which has its regional base at the University of Huddersfield, is also a collaborator, and there are 29 industrial partners, including leading firms such as Rolls-Royce, Jaguar Land Rover, GKN Aerospace, BAE Systems, Siemens, Reliance Precision and Carl Zeiss.
Another key partner is the UK-based multi-national Renishaw. Speaking at the launch the company's Group Engineering Director, Professor Geoff McFarland, described the trajectory of modern manufacturing, with its “intelligent factories with zero waste and optimal efficiency using automated processes”.
Metrology was crucial to this, said Professor McFarland, describing the science as “one of our best manufacturing tools”, and it needed to have a presence on the shop floor.