Advanced Forming Research Centre

The Advanced Forming Research Centre (AFRC) is a collaborative venture between the University of Strathclyde, Scottish Enterprise, the Scottish Government, and leading multinational engineering firms including Barnes Aerospace, Boeing, Rolls-Royce and TIMET. A £30M investment in plant and equipment in a bespoke building near Glasgow International Airport enables the development of forming and forging technologies to support the design and manufacture of new products for many sectors.

We offer two Tiers of membership. Tier 1 confers seats on the Main and Technical Boards, influence over the future research programme, attendance at research workshops, and free access to the research outputs. Tier 2 allows attendance at exclusive members’ events, and access to research outputs can be arranged. Any membership requires a commitment of at least 3 years.

We also undertake private research for a single company or for a consortium.

As well as research carried out in AFRC, we also work with industry through Knowledge Transfer Partnerships and our Industrial Doctorate Centre.

The key challenge that the AFRC addresses is the need to take low maturity technology developed with-in a research environment and deploy it in a manu-facturing facility.

The AFRC houses over £7m of equipment which will rise to around £15M-worth by the end of 2013, much of it built to our specifications. AFRC can heat, shape, finish, measure, test and analyse metal parts and components, in-house.

We develop our research programme in conjunction with our members. Current topics include Residual Stress, Die Life, Process Characterisation, Material Characterisation, Heating/Thermal Processes, Superplastic Forming, Sheet forming, as well as supporting technologies including Automation and Metrology.