Announced as a four-year programme during the Paris Airshow in 2013, the UK's National Aerospace Technology Exploitation Programme (NATEP) aims to stimulate innovation projects, specifically within the smaller companies in the aerospace value chain.
Unlike most other innovation funding schemes, though, NATEP has a very hands-on approach to making sure that the effects are not just in the development of specific technologies, but in raising the capability levels of a significant portion of the UK aerospace value chain. It has been a busy and very productive couple of years for the NATEP team and for the project participants.
NATEP is an Aerospace Growth Partnership (AGP) initiative, managed by ADS and supported in the UK by the English regional aerospace alliances comprising the Farnborough Aerospace Consortium, Midlands Aerospace Alliance, North West Aerospace Alliance and the West of England Aerospace Federation, Invest Northern Ireland, Scottish Enterprise and the Welsh Government. It is a practice demonstration of how these partners are working together with governments to support the AGP industrial Strategy ‘Lifting off'.
This £40 million programme, supported in England by £23m from the £345m fund of the Advanced Manufacturing Supply Chain Initiative (AMSCI) which is administered by Birmingham City Council through Finance Birmingham. The original target was to develop 100 technologies and to create or safeguard in the region of 1,200 high GVA jobs in the UK aerospace sector by bringing together the most innovative supply chain companies with universities and Catapults in collaborative R&D projects within limits of a 50% funding rate and £150k grant per project extending up to 18 months.
The programme provides high calibre technical and management resource to help those companies accelerate the technology development towards market readiness. Regional Assessment Panels of aerospace industry professionals and technology advisers throughout the English regions, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales are contributing their time for free to assess and support project applications and to provide ongoing governance for the process.
NATEP supports supply chain companies to develop innovative technologies, working in collaboration with others and supported by higher tier companies. It will equip them to win new business with existing companies and to diversify their customer base, including in export markets.
In addition to having to be collaborative, projects must also include an end user of the technology with an active role within the consortium, either engaged in the R&D activity or providing direction to ensure the relevance and meaningfulness of the end result. The headcount of these, of course, involves all the main aerospace companies within the UK, such as Airbus, Rolls-Royce, BAE Systems and GKN, but also draws in companies further afield with European and North American customers for the new technologies and capabilities.
A wealth of technology
Technologies being supported by the programme have a range that encompasses all domains within the aerospace supply chain. The largest groups within this relate to manufacturing processes, involving around a quarter of the projects, and materials such as composite materials and additive layer manufacturing, but there are also aerospace product technologies involving electronics, design and modelling and projects developing on-board equipment and providing for ground support and maintenance and repair. The applications areas are predominantly within civil air transport, but are starting to also include representation from the emerging non-military UAV supply chain.
Rinicom is leading the ‘eyeQuad-T' project, along with partners HW Communications, which aims to produce a small, lightweight imaging system with pan, tilt and zoom functionality that captures optical and thermal video to support surveillance operations from small unmanned autonomous systems. EyeQuad-T will deliver enhanced capability to build basic situational awareness and detection that is essential for decision making.
Heraeus Noblelight is leading the development of ‘Xenon pulse technology in fibre placement' to provide ultraviolet preheating of carbon fibre tapes in carbon composite fibre placement, in conjunction with Hexcel Composites and for end user Rolls-Royce. The project is intended to lead to demonstration of improved processing performance within the National Composites Centre using their Coriolis automated fibre placement machine.
In the ‘Featherlite Seats' project, materials technology and logistics supplier Magnesium Elektron is working to reduce the barriers to the adoption of UK sourced magnesium alloys within commercial aircraft interiors. The first target for this is the optimisation of design and manufacturing for aircraft seat frames using magnesium alloy Elektron43, within an ultimate vision of establishing a UK-based supply chain with a global end market that extends beyond seats. Italian aircraft interior manufacturer, Geven is the end user in this project.
The ‘AerospaceSpecialProcesses.com' project led by SME Valuechain.com Enterprises intends to develop a collaborative on-line platform that streamlines communications between aerospace manufacturers and special process houses providing intuitive decision support to improve service levels, productivity and competitiveness.
Oxford Space Systems is working with Oxford University, Reliance Precision and end users Airbus Defence and Space to develop a ‘Large Deployable Space Antenna' as an enhancement to their existing 4 metre satellite antenna design.
Answer the call
NATEP is looking like it will easily achieve its objectives with current demand stretching the available funding. Already funding has been approved for 89 projects submitted in the first four calls for proposals worth a total of £14.1m of NATEP funding. From the first three calls which approved projects at roughly six monthly intervals from January 2014, funding will go to a total of 103 companies, seven universities and two catapult centres throughout England and four companies in Northern Ireland. The projects from the fourth call are still subject to contract, but the indications are that with the momentum building, this will roughly equal the sum of the earlier calls.
With some of the early first call projects already close to conclusion, around 80 fifth call outline proposals have just been submitted whose assessments and approvals are expected in the summer and autumn.
There has been an upswing in applications for the later calls four and five as NATEP has achieved brand recognition nationally. This momentum has been carried forward into planning for a continued round of funding, with invitation for further bids for outline project proposals anticipated in autumn 2015 subject to the availability of funding. The devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have indicated support for this already, although at this time there is no announcement on a similar intention for companies in the English Regions.
Apart from generally aligning with the larger strategic initiatives such as the UK Lifting Off, and European Clean Sky agendas, technologies emanating from the supply chain should help inform national aerospace strategy as, apart from applicability within the civil aerospace sector, there have been no constraints on what the applicants can propose. This programme is successfully challenging the perspective that innovation and technology development can only happen at Prime/Tier 1 level and that the remainder of the supply chain is only reactive.
Many companies are engaging with the NATEP process not just for the R&D grant funding but to access the extras that come with this. Not surprisingly, the largest effect is being seen already with companies who are engaging in both innovation and in collaboration for the first time: this is all about developing corporate CVs.
The difference with this programme is the amount of effort which has been allocated to mentoring of companies and consortia through the process. Most other collaborative R&D funding instruments accessible within Europe are ‘fire and forget', with little attention to developing the innovation capability of the participants. By comparison, NATEP is providing practical and expert support to help companies establish technology road mapping capability, to develop their Intellectual Property management process, risk management and to educate them in the design of efficient experiments for meaningful results.
The NATEP technology management team has grown to include 23 full- and part-time technology managers within the regional and national groups, with a portfolio of expert capabilities that matches the projects' subject matter well.
Busy making progress
The devolved Governments of Wales and Scotland have recognised the value of the programme and the cross border opportunities and are already contributing to the NATEP process at National Steering Board level.
Many participants are coming back for more, with a couple of organisations leading bids for different projects within three of the competition calls. As there is a general overall success rate of around 50% in being granted funding for NATEP projects, it is also clear that the effective footprint of the programme is greater than the portfolio of funded projects. The process of conducting the outline innovation planning necessary for submitting an application creates an effect in itself of stimulating action towards innovation in technology or processes.
NATEP therefore represents a tremendous opportunity, particularly for small- and medium-sized companies. By developing a supply chain with a high rate of innovation, rich in new technologies the UK will be better able to offer the right products and services, at the right time and competitively within the global aerospace sector value chains. This will ensure that market opportunities are exploited with high value manufacturing work retained in the UK.
www.natep.org.uk
