Public Funding for Altran UK Limited

HICLASS is a project to enable the delivery of the most complex software-intensive, safe and cyber-secure systems in the world. It is a strategic initiative to drive new technologies and best-practice throughout the UK aerospace supply chain, enabling the UK to affordably develop systems for the growing aircraft and avionics market expected over the next decades. It includes key primes, system suppliers, software companies and universities working together to meet the challenge of growing system complexity and size. HICLASS will allow development of new, complex, intelligent and internet-connected electronic products, safe and secure from cyber-attack that can be affordably certified.

"Despite our increasing ability to detect and monitor objects that exist on land, sea, around buildings or in space, our ability to detect objects beneath the ground has not improved significantly. When it comes to attempting to locate a buried and forgotten pipe, telling the extent of a sink hole or assessing the quality of infrastructure we still often resort to digging or drilling holes. This presents a huge economic and societal cost as road networks are dug up, oil wells are dry or brown-field land is left undeveloped. Existing techniques are all fundamentally limited in either their sensitivity (classical microgravity), their penetration (Ground Penetrating Radar) or their cost (seismic). For over 30 years, universities and academics have been exploiting the strange effects of quantum superposition to measure gravity with astonishing sensitivity. Using a process called cold-atom interferometry, the wave-partial duality of a rubidium atom is compared to the phase of a laser beam in a way which can detect very small changes in the way atoms fall freely in a vacuum. Changes in this free-fall can be used to determine the local strength of gravity and if this measurement is sensitive enough, the measurement can be used to tell whether there are voids, pipes, tunnels, oil and gas reserves in the ground beneath your feet. Although the potential is there, there are huge scientific and engineering challenges to delivering this performance. This project is proposed by the UK consortium of the best scientific and engineering companies the UK has to offer. Working with leading UK universities, these companies are looking to overcome these challenges, and develop a new industry of 'quantum' cold-atom sensors in the UK. If these advanced performances can be demonstrated, the economic and societal benefit of this new 'quantum' industry in the UK is expected to be significant and long-lasting."

This project will develop a pre-production prototype of a miniature atomic clock for providing precise timing to a variety of critical infrastructure services, such as reliable energy supply, safe transport links, mobile communications, data networks and electronic financial transactions. The precise measurement of time is fundamental to the effective functioning of these services, which currently rely on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) for a timing signal. However, GNSS signals are easily disrupted either accidentally or maliciously, and in prolonged GNSS unavailability, these critical services stop functioning. The reliance on GNSS for precision timing, and the consequent vulnerability of our essential services prompted InnovateUK to commission a report published by London Economics in June 2017\. It estimated the impact on the UK economy of a five day GNSS outage at £5.2B. That message is becoming widely understood and is creating a demand for timing solutions that are not GNSS dependent. The next generation miniature atomic clock arising from this project fulfills this need and will find widespread application in precision timing for mobile base stations, network servers for financial services, data centres, national power distribution networks and air traffic control systems. Further applications arise in areas where an independent timing reference is needed on mobile platforms and especially in areas where no GNSS signal is available. A high performance compact clock would benefit a range of useful capabilities, addressing civil and military applications, bringing both technical and economic gains for the UK.

Wireless control systems in Nuclear Applications can enable economic growth and improve asset integrity. The ability to remotely-power and securely communicate control responses and asset information within a Nuclear Plant, can make control systems more robust and secure to external influences, such as plant sabotage or loss of electrical power, whilst also making the plant safer for operatives, reducing the number of human interactions required for servicing connections, lowering dosage. The deletion of power/data harnesses from in-reactor applications can facilitate faster deployment and replacement of instrumentation, and flexibility of deployment in hard-to-reach areas can enable monitoring of asset integrity to currently unachievable levels – these advantages can contribute to reduced service downtime and increased profitability for new build, existing plants and decommissioning. This research project explores the feasibility of designing a Nuclear Control System using wireless technology; as well as designing system architectures the research will determine appropriate control contexts, the resultant system reliability claims and approvals route to validate the viability of deploying this technology in Nuclear applications across the UK’s Civil Nuclear landscape.

SECT-AIR’s aims are to develop strategies for the UK high integrity software industry to significantly lower development costs and to scope a UK aerospace software centre-of excellence to maintain these strategies in the future. SECT-AIR plans to define processes and technologies that will make a step change reduction to software development costs; gain adoption of these through certification authorities and wider industry engagement and to ensure a better flow of technology between academia and industry in these areas in the future.

'Intelligent Adaptive EHM' is a reasearch project delivered by a consortium comprising Rolls-Royce, Altran, Artesis, Humaware and the University of Sheffield who are developing a major improvement to Equipment Health Management (EHM) capability to: introduce intelligent adaptation to on-aircraft systems to maximise predictability of EHM; to monitor new lean burn combustion technology in Gas Turbines; improving the formulation of information from remote equipment, where the data feed is optimised according to equipment condition, context and state; and developing higher level systems control over integrated electrical power systems, that enables system reconfiguration to reduce degradation of faulty system components. This will result in higher Gas Turbine engine reliability and IPS system robustness. Overall this research will substantially improve the predictability of EHM in diagnosing and prognosing faults, whilst reducing false alerts.

One of the most fundamental properties affecting the aerodynamic performance of a body is its shape. With progressively increasing demands for performance, the need to explore and optimise the performance of novel airframe shapes rapidly and with robust, efficient processes is becoming increasingly important. This poses significant challenges for the ways in which the associated geometry is generated and manipulated (in support of design) both on its wetted surfaces and in the adjacent air flow (i.e. the computational mesh). Greater attention is being focused on these challenges globally and it is vital that the UK keeps ahead of the competition. The proposed research programme will, for the first time, bring together key strands of the UK aerodynamics community who are currently active in this area, facilitate knowledge sharing and cross-fertilisation via complementary, research activities, and establish innovative capabilities and shared understanding.

AANSD (Airbus Numerical Simulation and Design) addresses the need to develop specific simulation and design technologies fundamental to future capability to undertake aerodynamic and multidisciplinary (MD) design. It will research techniques to provide new technologies to the Airbus simulation toolset for exploitation on aircraft design. Airbus’s partners are ARA and Altran-Xype. Within this project there are 3 work packages, each with a specific topic and set of deliverables: • Meshing Technologies – focused on the next generation of meshing capabilities • Aerodynamic Design – focused on aircraft representation for optimisation and multidisciplinary (MD) trades • Integrated Capability – focused on a more efficient MD simulation and design process