TWI Annual Review - July 2008

Achievements in 2007

• There has been a 20% growth in Membership in this sector during the year.
• TWI has carried out more than 100 confidential projects for Members in 2007 representing a growth in income of more than 35% compared with the previous year.
• Activities to increase support for Industrial Members in the sea and land defence sectors have resulted in a number of major contracts with the UK's Ministry of Defence and its supply chain. This has included the award of two projects under the Competition of Ideas programme.
• Project work has increased in the area of improving the sustainability of through-life activities from 'cradle to cradle'. One such project involves the dismantling of ships and how ship design and the through-life supply chain can be modified to produce more sustainable solutions.

Future Plans

• Sustainability is a major concern to all Members in the sector and further programmes targeted at reducing the carbon footprint and the embodied energy in products are envisaged. There is a continual drive to reduce energy consumption and thus TWI will work with Members to develop lighter weight transportation.
• TWI will continue to engage with the defence sector to improve the survival of defence personnel and equipment.
• Hidden costs in manufacturing, for example corrective measures to overcome fabrication distortion, cost industry millions of pounds per annum and consume valuable resources. TWI will work with Members to improve the accuracy of fabrication and thus reduce re-work.
• TWI is working with large industrial concerns and SMEs alike to develop collaborative projects for submission to the European Commission to address future needs in manufacturing.

Case Study Modern designs for naval vessels are increasingly concerned with weight reduction in order to improve performance, manoeuvrability and fuel efficiency. The complex light weight panels used in construction are prone to distortion and thus extensive re-work could be envisaged. TWI worked with two of its Member companies, the Ministry of Defence and VT Shipbuilding, to address this problem. Finite element analysis has been used for many years, with varying degrees of success, to model welding distortion. However, its application to large panels has been limited by the size of the model required and the necessary computing capacity. Advanced techniques used by TWI enabled large panels consisting of almost 200 weld seams to be analysed much more quickly than was previously possible and this allowed the effect of weld sequence to be studied. As a result of the programme, it was possible to reduce weld distortion in production panels by almost 70%.