Engineering, Design and Manufacture

About the Group

Since engineering design and manufacture are the two most important stages of product life cycle in terms of crucial decision making regarding its design/form/shape, material selection/sustainability, manufacturing, operation/use and recycling/disposal of product, and end of life cycle, an integrated concurrent design and manufacture approach is the state-of-the-art practice currently employed in the industry.

Due to the recent advancements in design (simulation/virtual reality/digital twinning), materials (smart/composite/3D printed materials), and manufacturing (additive/hybrid/robotics/automation), there is great scope now to research, design, manufacture and evaluate new sustainable products and systems in different fields of engineering.

The Engineering Design and Manufacture (EDM) research group is formulated to bring together researchers from various fields of engineering (mechanical, electronics, yacht design and renewable energy) at Solent University to research the development of products using the latest advancements in design, materials, and manufacturing technologies.

Areas of expertise

The group members have existing research strengths and have conducted internal and external, nationally and internationally funded Engineering design and manufacture related research projects in mechanical engineering, renewable energy engineering, electronics engineering and yacht engineering.

The group's aim

The EDM research group will consolidate each member’s individual research towards a joint research approach with well-defined focus areas in engineering, as well as plan collectively for interdisciplinary research and externally funded research projects to gain a critical mass and volume of research output leading to more peer-reviewed publications and impact case studies being generated for the REF 2027 submission.

Some research group members are already using their research to inform their teaching in the form of case study examples and new lab equipment/components designed and manufactured as research results. It is envisaged that formalising an engineering design and manufacture research group will enable a wider insight and a more solid approach for integrating research into our practical and theoretical teaching to the benefit of students and improvement of courses.

Research themes

The EDM research group members intend work on the following key themes of engineering design and manufacture:

• Engineering simulation and testing
• Additive manufacturing materials design and characterisation
• Composites design and manufacture
• Non-destructive testing (NDT) and imaging
• Renewable energy infrastructure and processes design
• Sustainability engineering
• Acoustics modelling and characterisation
• Wireless systems and networking domains
• Computational engineering algorithms
• Multi-physics modelling and simulation
• Automated sensing and analysis of data sets