Advanced Composite Training and Development Centre

The Advanced Composite Training and Development Centre was established in 2010 as the result of a partnership between Wrexham University, Airbus and Welsh Government. Based near Airbus in Bretton, the centre has helped thousands of aerospace industry employees and apprentices to develop their composite manufacturing skills.

Composite materials consist of two or more substances combined to produce properties which cannot be achieved by the individual components alone; they play a pivotal role in aircraft manufacturing by increasing performance and carbon efficiency whilst providing opportunity to reduce costs. Our state-of-the-art laboratory enables research, teaching, industry collaboration, training and skills development, to help develop faster manufacturing and processing techniques for composite materials.

What we do

Developing advanced composites for application:

Low temperature testing
Advanced curing process
Rapid Processing

Composites Centre Transcript

Research

Research led by Wrexham University is targeted at developing faster manufacturing and processing techniques for composite materials, to help meet future demand for aircraft and composites in general.

The centre has undertaken research work with aeronautical companies, military supporting companies and wider industry in processing resin, materials and samples to reduce the amount of time it takes to process composites.

Research areas include:

Out of autoclave processing (microwave)
Chemistry – cure kinetics
Composite Optics, utilising links with the cutting-edge research centre for the Opto-Electronics technology industry in St Aspah

Publications
Durieux, Olivier, Day, Richard and Vagapov, Yuriy (2023) A Test Rig for the Calibration of Strain Sensing Carbon Fibre. In: 3rd Int. Conf. on Communication, Computing and Industry 4.0, 15-16 Dec. 2022, Bangalore, India.

Nuhiji, Betime, Bower, Matthew P., Proud, William A.E., Burpo, Steven J., Day, Richard, Scaife, Richard J and Swait, Timothy (2021) The Effects of Absorbing Materials on the Homogeneity of Composite Heating by Microwave Radiation. Materials, 14 (23). p. 7362. ISSN 1996-1944

Nuhiji, Betime, Bower, Matthew P, Swait, Timothy, Phadnis, Vaibhav, Day, Richard and Scaife, Richard J (2021) Simulation of carbon fibre composites in an industrial microwave. Materials Today: Proceedings. ISSN 2214-7853

Spencer, Locke D, Veenendaal, Ian D, Naylor, David A, Gom, Brad G, Huber, Anthony I, Christiansen, Adam, Benson, Chris S, Gunuganti, Sudhakar, Jones, Martyn, Day, Richard, Walker, David, Zobeiry, Navid, Poursartip, Anoush and Sitwell, Geoffrey R H (2018) Composite Material Evaluation at Cryogenic Temperatures for Applications in Space-Based Far-Infrared Astronomical Instrumentation. In: Advances in Optical and Mechanical Technologies for Telescopes and Instrumentation III, SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 10-15 June 2018, Austin, Texas, USA.

Green, J E, Nuhiji, B, Zivtins, K, Bower, P, Grainger, R V, Day, Richard and Scaife, R J (2017) Internal Model Control of a Domestic Microwave for Carbon Composite Curing. IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques, 65 (11). ISSN 0018-9480

Day, Richard, Khan, Laraib A. and Kausar, Ayesha (2017) Aerospace composite cured by quickstep and autoclave processing techniques: Evaluation and comparison of reaction progress. Aerospace Science and Technology, 65. pp. 100-105. ISSN 1270-9638

Work with us

Wrexham University welcomes enquiries from industry and academia to establish new collaborative research links and can offer short term consultancy or contracted research.