Warwick: £5M advanced engineering imaging centre opens

A £5 million laboratory containing advanced imaging equipment for use by local engineering companies opened last week at the Warwick Manufacturing Group at Warwick University.

The Premium Vehicle Customer Interface Technologies (PVCIT) Centre, funded by the development agency Advantage West Midlands and the European Regional Development Fund, is home to high resolution laser scanners, a precision computer tomography scanner, and the UK’s highest resolution 3D ‘Power Wall’. Together, this will provide companies in the area with access to unprecedented imaging technologies.

Mark Williams, WMG researcher and PVCIT Principal Investigator, said West Midlands companies are queuing up for free access to this technology. It will, “Allow them to do everything from searching for microscopic defects deep inside welded components, to laser scanning whole products as big as a car, or van, to create 3D models accurate to 5 thousands of a millimetre, which they can then display and manipulate on the Centre’s 3D ‘Power Wall’.”

One of the first companies through the doors of the new facility was Cab Automotive Ltd, which manufactures seats for the automotive industry. The company needs to conduct detailed analyses of the quality of every weld joint, but up till now could only do so by physically cutting apart and dissecting every weld. Using PVCIT’s CT scanner it is possible to precision scan every weld in just 25 hours.

John Pendleton Managing Director of Cab Automotive said, “The traditional approach of testing weld quality is simply to cut welds open and look inside. Getting access to the CT scanning method was significantly quicker, cheaper and effective. This non-destructive testing has already saved the company £50,000.”

For more information, visit: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/wmg/research/pvcit/