At the heart of the National Composites Centre is a 25,500 sqm manufacturing facility with a wide range of technologies that are accessible to industry for the development of next generation products.
The vast workshop space is reconfigurable to suit project needs and provides our customers with a safe and secure way of working with some of the latest and greatest equipment and materials the industry has to offer.
Our facility is:
Our twin-ring braider can create components that are hollow and straight or complex cross sections with curved profiles. Our tape winder and filament winder machines can create anything from high-strength pipes to high pressure type 4 hydrogen tanks.
The NCC is the best equipped research centre for automated fibre placement (AFP), tensioned fibre placement (TFP) and automated tape laying (ATL) in the world.
Our dedicated high value manufacturing workshop is equipped with an automated preforming cell, which feeds an overmoulder and a range of presses capable of producing complex and repeatable parts with very fast composites cycle times (sub-5 minutes).
The NCC’s Ultra High Rate Deposition cell contains two huge industrial robots that automate the production process for future large scale, high rate composite products such as wings and turbine blades.
Our bespoke ceramic matrix composite (CMC) development facility includes material storage and processing equipment specifically for CMC applications.
Resin infusion has the potential to lower manufacturing costs compared to the current prepreg and autoclave solutions. At the NCC we have both High Temperature Resin Transfer Moulding and Large Scale Resin Infusion technology capabilities.
We have a large-scale verification cell with twin agile inspection robots to enable fast geometric measurement and non-destructive testing (NDT). Combined with our materials science capabilities and laboratory space, we are able to provide confidence that a product will perform as intended.
Our team of specialist composites engineers have extensive industrial experience from across a range of sectors. We work as part of your team to boost your innovation capabilities for long-term programmes or rapid turnaround projects.
We can connect you with the right partners, business support and HVM Catapult expertise you need to solve your challenge.
