Public Funding for Graham Engineering Limited

"TIG welding is a commonly used joining technique for fabricating metal structures across a range of industries. However, it currently has a number of limitations, principally (i) it's heavily reliant on highly-skilled manual welding experts (which are expensive and in very short supply) and (ii) it lacks flexibility to automate the welding of complex geometries. Adaptive AUTOmated TIG welding (AutoTIG) aims to develop an adaptive and automated closed loop controlled TIG welding system. The project will take state-of-the-art knowledge in welding and adaptive control, and combine this with a process head with a range integrated sensors. Sensors will be used to establish welding paths and vision systems will collect and analyse images of the weldpool for real time adaptive control. Combining sensor data and process knowledge is an innovative approach which we believe will provide a solution to overcome the barriers to robotic TIG welding This will enable a demonstration system to address, monitor and control: the full welding process leading to a high-productivity and low-defect rate TIG welding process."

The majority of existing offshore wind turbines are built on monopile foundations, space-frame foundations (jackets) will be the foundations of choice for most new applications. This will enable wind turbines to be deployed at greater water depth, further from the shore leading to higher wind speeds and increased potential generation capacity per swept area. However, current manufacturing techniques for turbine jackets are non-serial and particularly labour intensive, a direct consequence of the manual fabrication methods typically used. The LaserJacket project will assess three innovative thick-section (>60mm) laser welding techniques, which have a high-productivity, are cost-effective, and suitable for the manufacture of thick-section turbine jackets. We will subsequently, down-select a single welding technique which will be further developed and demonstrated for applicability to offshore wind turbine jackets.

Safer, low-cost nuclear material storage through cold spray-formed boron carbide coated components (SafeStore) Transport and/or storage of spent nuclear fuel can require neutron shielding materials. Two such materials currently used are composite plate materials consisting of aluminium (or aluminium alloys) containing varying proportions of boron carbide particulates, which have a high neutron absorbing capability. Whilst these metal matrix composite (MMC) materials are suitable for specific niche applications, the current manufacturing route is unable to produce them in anything other than flat solid plates. This limits the design options for containers/canisters. In the SafeStore project, cold spray coating technology was used to develop a material that is similar to the MMC but can be applied to sheet metal fabrications in any desired thickness up to tens of millimetres. Cold spray technology facilitates the co-deposition of thermally sensitive and/or easily oxidised materials such as Al and B4C without thermal degradation. The coatings were developed and applied to steel samples and plates and the deposition parameters were then further improved to obtain higher levels of B4C in the coatings.The use of a coating results in better design flexibility and hence better and more cost-effective dry cask storage options. The project was led by Graham Engineering, a UK-based company with a strong track record in the supply of nuclear waste fuel containers. TWI conducted the coatings development work whilst Graham Engineering helped define the market needs and facilitated the characterisation and evaluation of the radiological performance of the coatings. Project Participants and TSB Grant Graham Engineering Ltd – Grant £27,000 TWI Ltd(Industrial) – Grant £67,500 Total Grant = £94,500