Public Funding for Amphenol Invotec Limited

The 3DP-Harness project is industrial research to develop a demonstrator for an innovative technology for the robotic manufacture and installation of wiring harnesses through digital and additive manufacturing. This solution would revolutionise one of the last labour intensive elements of high value manufacturing. The SME partners, CEL and PEL, are UK SMEs in the high tech manufacturing sector. Amphenol Invotec are the UK's leading PCB manufacturer with an especially strong focus in defence, aero and space sectors. The initial customers for this technology are Tier 1 aerospace suppliers due to the specific advantages of the technology.

The STOWURC project is aimed at developing sustainable materials and processes that use waste products from the seafood industry to treat effluent and recover metals from the printed circuit board (PCB) and related industries. The UK PCB industry is strategically important to the country but its chemical processes can generate waste products that are expensive to treat. The shells of crabs and other crustaceans are a source of materials known as chitosans which can absorb metals. They thus have the ability to recover the metals that are found in PCB manufacturing effluent. The UK's seafood industry generates large volumes of shellfish waste and the project is using this waste to produce chitosan-based materials that can sustainably treat the effluent produced by PCB makers and companies producing similar types of metal bearing waste products. The project partners have identified international interest in using chitosan-based materials from PCB manufacturers and there are also much larger applications in other sectors, including surface engineering. Crab shells are typically expensive to dispose of and this project will enable them to become valuable raw materials.

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BEDS Program Project Description The retail sector would like to adopt a sustainable approach to the electronics used in printed circuit boards (PCB’s), price/security tags, and simple displays.. This is partly a result of EU legislation such as EUP, REACH, WEEE and RoHS requiring solutions for sustainable electronics manufacture to be urgently found and also overall pressure for reductions in landfill quotas. This project will investigate producing sheets of encapsulated biopolymers as substrates for PCBs that can be degraded at the end of life and enable the effective revovery of the active metals within the original circuits with a minimum impact on landfill.

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The public description for this project has been requested but has not yet been received.

Direct Write (DW) is primarily an additive process where functional materials are directly imaged onto substrates to form components with no waste or processing chemicals. DW methods are environmentally friendly, energy efficient and have a small process footprint. The aim of COPE is to take DW technology from Proof of Concept (PoC) to robustly engineered preproduction level demonstration, focussing on adding functionality to structures using inkjet and micro-nozzle techniques with highly engineered functional inks. The project will address issues such as design, manufacturing, cost, durability, product certification and through life management that includes recycling and disposal. The challenge is to mature DW technology so that it meets current functional and durability standards. PoC components can be manufactured, however it has been shown that the level of function is relatively low and more importantly that lifetime can be very short. This project will develop the basic capability toolset to convert highly engineered functional nanoparticulate powders into robust engineered products.

INBOARD is a new and exciting technology for tracking electronics from PCB manufacturing to end of life. This collaborative research and development project involving several key UK electronics companies, a recycler and Loughborough University has demonstrated a new technology that enables information about an electronic product to be stored and accessed all the way from the initial printed circuit board manufacturing stage to end of life and recycling. The Technology Strategy Board supported INBOARD project has developed a novel product and process monitoring system with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) embedded into the Printed Circuit Board. This technology enables relevant information to travel with the product across the whole electronics manufacturing supply chain including printed circuit board manufacturing, assembly, and original equipment manufacturing (OEM), use and end of life /recycling. The RFID tags can be used to monitor and optimise manufacturing processes, track components, locally store life-cycle information and support dismantling and recycling. By using these embedded components, it will be possible to reduce the lifecycle costs of manufactured products radically by increasing observability.

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