Personal statement

Dr Alastair Conway is a Senior Manufacturing Engineer within the Advanced Forming Research Centre (AFRC), a pioneering industrial focused research facility at the University of Strathclyde. The AFRC seeks to create major advancements in net shape manufacturing techniques that will result in sustained increased competitiveness of the UK‟s manufacturing base. As Team Lead for the Forging and Incremental Technologies team within AFRC, Alastair's primary interests and activities lie in the development and understanding of metal forming and forging processes and their application to new and existing products. The team's remit covers two key strategic development areas: High integrity forging and thermal processing - For high value applications the main purpose of forging and thermal processing is to transform the underlying strength, life and behaviour of high strength metals used in the toughest of applications. AFRC’s expertise helps product designers and manufacturing engineers make critical choices about material and process selection. Near net shape design and make - We aim to help customers who want to make informed decisions about how to manufacture their current and future products, and the design implications of those manufacturing decisions. Our methodology naturally favours solutions that make use of low energy, material efficient process routes such as cold forming, as well as breaking some of the sterotypical views that exist around tooling cost as a barrier to entry for certain process / product combinations. These activities involve research and development in the process optimisation, materials characterisation, component and tooling design and the transfer of knowledge to and from leading manufacturing organisations.