Centre to encourage virtual engineering

The Virtual Engineering Centre (VEC), which will be financed with £2.5m from the Northwest European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), £1.18m from the Northwest Regional Development Agency (NWDA) and £1.64m from Liverpool University. It is expected to encourage virtual engineering activities and joint research programmes across the sector and between industry and academia.

The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) is hosting the centre at Daresbury Laboratory and is providing £200,000 of support through access to its large computational science and engineering machines and its scientists’ expertise in specialist software development.

Virtual Engineering (VE) involves integrated product/process modelling and the creation of virtual prototypes.

Major aerospace companies are said to be committed to VE as it provides a cost-effective method of presenting future options to the customer and capturing their requirements.

However, according to STFC, integrated VE tools and techniques have not been successfully implemented across the whole lifecycle and throughout the supply chain, presenting a major barrier to organisations adopting the technology.