RESEARCH NEWS
UK’ s Large Structures Innovation Centre
NCC has announced plans to establish the UK’ s first Large Structures Innovation Centre( LSIC). This is projected to be a new, open-access facility that will enable industry to design, develop and de-risk the next generation of large structures at full industrial scale.
Operated by NCC( part of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult), the LSIC will provide companies working with large, complex components the space, equipment and specialist engineering expertise to accelerate development. The Centre will combine integrated design and full-scale demonstration to support sectors including wind, construction and maritime.
“ It will give industry access to the capabilities needed to advance technology innovation across the entire engineering life cycle( from concept to end-of-life), helping businesses of all sizes to industrialise new products faster and achieve their growth ambitions. The LSIC will play a vital role in anchoring technology and product leadership in the UK,” commented the NCC.
“ By accelerating the development and industrialisation of advanced large-scale
structures, it will help to secure high-value manufacturing and strengthen UK supply chains. It will also build sovereign capability, reducing reliance on overseas technologies and positioning the UK to lead in global innovation,” it added.
Next-generation blade technology
The LSIC’ s first focus will be wind, where global decarbonisation goals and the drive to reduce energy costs are accelerating demand for larger, more powerful turbine blades.
The LSIC will provide an open-access facility where industry can validate and de-risk new processes, materials and automation strategies under real-world conditions and at full scale( offline from live production).
“ By bridging the gap between laboratory and factory, the LSIC will offer access to advanced automation, improved process control and facilities capable of handling fullscale blades, accelerating the development of the next generation of high-performance wind systems. Advanced turbine technologies is a major opportunity identified in the Offshore Wind Industrial Growth Plan and critical to the UK’ s clean energy transition,” added the NCC.
Work to establish the LSIC is now underway, with the first innovation projects due to begin in 2026. NCC will announce details on collaboration partners later.
NCC is an innovation organisation that turns research and technology into industrial impact, bridging the gap between academia and industry. It is part of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult and the University of Bristol. n
www
. nccuk. com
“ Pull of a string” to deploy complex structures
MIT( Massachusetts Institute of Technology) researchers in the U. S. have developed a new method for designing 3D structures that can be transformed from a flat configuration into their curved, fully formed shape with a single pull of a string. This technique could enable the rapid deployment of a temporary field hospital at the site of a disaster such as a devastating tsunami— a situation where quick medical action is essential to save lives.
The researchers’ approach converts a user-specified 3D structure into a flat shape composed of interconnected tiles. The algorithm uses a two-step method to find the path with minimal friction for a string that can be tightened to smoothly actuate the structure.
“ The actuation mechanism is easily reversible and if the string is released, the structure quickly returns to its flat configuration. This could enable complex, 3D structures to be stored and transported more efficiently and with less cost,” said MIT.
The designs generated by the system are agnostic to the fabrication method, so complete structures can be produced using 3D printing, CNC milling, moulding or other techniques.
“ This method could enable the creation of
transportable medical devices, foldable robots that can flatten to enter hard-to-reach spaces or even modular space habitats that can be actuated by robots working on the surface of Mars,” added MIT.
“ The simplicity of the whole actuation mechanism is a real benefit of our approach. The user just needs to provide their intended design, and then our method optimises it in such a way that it holds the shape after just one pull on the string so the structure can be deployed very easily. I hope people will be able to use this method to create a wide variety of different, deployable structures,” said Akib Zaman, an electrical engineering and computer science( EECS) graduate student and lead author of a paper on this new method. The method breaks a user design into a grid of quadrilateral tiles inspired by kirigami, the ancient Japanese art of paper cutting. With kirigami, by cutting a material in certain ways, they can encode it with unique properties. In this case, they use kirigami to create an auxetic mechanism, which is a structure that becomes thicker when stretched and thinner when compressed.
“ Our method makes it easy for the user. All they have to do is input their design, and our algorithm automatically takes care of the rest. Then all the user needs to do is to fabricate the tiles exactly the way it has been computed by the algorithm,” said Zaman.
This method is scale-independent, so it could be used to create tiny deployable objects that are injected and actuated inside the body, or architectural structures( such as the frame of a building) that are deployed and actuated on-site using cranes. This research is funded, in part, by an MIT Research Support Committee Award. n
https:// web. mit. edu /
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