The Henry Royce Institute
The Henry Royce Institute is the UK’s national institute for advanced materials research and innovation, supporting world leading excellence in UK materials research. Having invested over £330 million in world-class equipment, infrastructure, training and outreach across 11 institutions, Royce works with the UK materials community to develop solutions to national and global challenges.
The Royce Discovery Centre
The Royce Discovery Centre, based at the University of Sheffield City Centre Campus, focuses on early-stage research on materials discovery and processing. The facility takes materials and processing concepts, and develops these from basic principles through analytical and experimental processes, with the aim of proving the concept in terms of feasibility and applicability for industrial use. Housing state-of-the-art specialist laboratories, workshops, and office spaces, the Royce Discovery Centre draws on expertise present within the Royce team and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, to provide real solutions in the discovery and creation of innovative material systems.
The Royce Pathfinder Project
Title: Data-capture for advanced metals processing
The Henry Royce Institute will lead a Pathfinder project on developing data infrastructure for exploring Processing-Structure-Property relationships (P-S-P) in metallurgy. The project will have three objectives: (i) develop ontology / metadata schema for describing metals processing; (ii) develop microstructural descriptors and software tools to digitally fingerprint microscopy images; (iii) develop and install infrastructure (physical and digital) for capturing and storing P-S-P information (digital thread). It will build on work in previous PSDI pathfinders and adapt some of these learnings to the particularly challenging metallurgical space, where the processing history strongly affects microstructure and performance and where considerable redundancy and inefficiency may exist, and current data capture is often unstructured.
The pathfinder will be led through the Royce Discovery Centre in Sheffield and will make use of their extensive additive manufacturing facilities, which provide a data-rich platform in which to develop the capabilities that form part of this Pathfinder with a view to generalising them for deployment in more traditional metallurgical applications, such as casting and forging.