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National Composites Centre (NCC)

The National Composites Centre is the world leading authority on composites, bringing together the best minds and the best technologies, to solve the world’s most complex engineering challenges.

The National Composites Centre (NCC) is one of seven centres that form the UK’s High Value Manufacturing Catapult (HVMC). It works globally to accelerate the adoption of high-value, sustainable engineering solutions in composites.

Its world-class, open access facilities are based in Bristol, UK – the heartland of Britain’s high tech composite engineering R&D. Its technology innovation centres bring together over 500 composites specialists with cutting-edge digital manufacturing technology for the design and development of new composite products. The NCC specialises in providing industrial solutions all the way from the lab to developing large-scale production.

The NCC offers advice and training, design and simulation, metrology, digital manufacturing, automation and tooling, materials and processing.It is able to work with organisations of all sizes and in all states of maturity from starts-ups through micro organisations to scale-ups and large OEMs. It has a proven track record of helping small companies adopt composite solutions as well as partnering the world’s most significant engineering companies with their biggest R&D programmes. It brings its broad cross-sector knowledge to new sectors looking for sustainable engineering solutions and, working with the High Value Manufacturing Catapult network, offers a one stop shop for any manufacturing challenge.

NCC

Technology Capabilities

The NCC brings together dynamic companies and academics to develop new technologies for the design and rapid manufacture of high-quality composite products

Advanced Assembly

Assembly is the general term for applications that assemble and inspect the fundamental parts to form a final product or sub-component.

Automation

Automation is the use of various control systems for operating equipment such as machinery, processes in factories, and other applications with minimal or reduced human intervention.

Composites

Composite materials are materials made from two or more constituent materials with significantly different physical or chemical properties, that when combined, produce a material with characteristics different from the individual components.

Design

Design for manufacture is a term used to describe the process of designing products/parts/components in a way that optimises all the manufacturing functions as well as ensuring that design supports the optimisation of cost, quality and regulatory compliance.

Digital Manufacturing

Advanced manufacturing is a highly knowledge intensive sector where advances in IT systems have a huge role to play in improving manufacturing intelligence; capturing, sharing and managing big data; supporting collaboration; increasing efficiency & speeding up innovation.

Joining

Joining technology is fundamental to engineering and manufacturing.

Machining

Machining is any of various processes in which a piece of raw material is cut into a desired final shape and size by a controlled material-removal process.

Manufacturing with Polymers

Polymeric materials are created via polymerisation of many small molecules.

Materials Characterisation

Materials characterisation refers to the broad and general process by which a material’s structure and properties are probed, measured and tested.

Metrology

Metrology (the science of measurement) provides critical quality assurance for manufacturing processes.

Modelling and Simulation

Modelling and simulation is getting information about how something will behave without actually testing it in real life.

Netshape and Additive Manufacturing

Additive Manufacturing (AM) is the process of creating objects directly from digital files via the successive addition of discrete layers of material.

Resource Efficient and Sustainable Manufacturing

The efficient use of resources in manufacturing processes coupled with low carbon and low energy manufacturing processes is a major target across the whole of manufacturing industry.

Tooling and Fixtures

Tooling refers to workings or specialist manufacturing aids which are usually limited in use to a specific production line or the performance of a specific contract or job.

Visualisation and Virtual Reality

Virtual reality refers to a set of techniques in which one interacts with a synthetic (“virtual”) environment that exists solely in the computer.

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If you have any questions we'd like to hear from you. Whether you're interested in working with us or would simply like to know more about the NCC, don't hesitate to get in touch.