Tata Steel, a major manufacturer of electrical steel, has progressed in a new approach to its research and development in the UK with its participation in facilties at Swansea University and the University of Warwick.
Swansea University
The opening of the Steel & Metals Institute at Swansea in February was recognized as the most recent milestone of the new approach. Engineers and researchers at the institute will be working on a range of new materials to meet the emerging need for next-generation steels for hybrid and electric cars, energy-efficient homes and buildings and innovative food packaging. The institute is positioned to be the forerunner to the UK National Steel Innovation Centre which is due to be operational by 2020.
Swansea University, together with the University of Warwick, is part of our two-hub strategy for collaborative research and development with universities, noted Bimlendra Jha, CEO of Tata Steel UK. Integrating this new facility at Swansea with our existing network of researchers at different universities in UK is a stepping stone to our win-win approach to innovation. Researchers get real world problems to solve and Tata Steel brings its expertise and resources to give wings to innovative ideas.
Tata Steels ties with UK academia are already well rooted funding six professorial chairs at the universities of Warwick, Oxford Brookes, Cambridge, Cardiff and South Wales, and Imperial College London while more than 80 researchers work directly for Tata Steel.
According to Ernst Hoogenes, Tata Steel Europes head of R&D, “Opening this new R&D centre at Swansea University is a major step towards consolidating and strengthening our R&D in the UK. This will help us accelerate our open innovation activities and will lead to exciting new steels to give our customers a competitive edge.
The new centre will ultimately have a combination of metallurgists, product engineers, data scientists, researchers and technicians. Tata Steel will provide more than 40 industry R&D staff to work alongside 20 new Swansea University research staff. The company has also committed annual funding to contribute to the running of the Institute and donated a wide range of research equipment to the University.
At Tata Steels R&D facility based at the University of Warwick engineers and researchers work on new steel coatings, including graphene, as well as other advanced product development. It was opened in 2015.
Tata Steel is one of Europe’s leading steel producers, with steelmaking in the UK and Netherlands, and manufacturing plants across Europe. The company supplies steel products to a variety of markets including construction and infrastructure, automotive, packaging and engineering. The combined Tata Steel group is one of the top global steel companies, with an annual steel capacity of 27.5 million tons and almost 74,000 employees across five continents. The groups revenue in the year ending March 2017 was $18.1 billion. Its subsidiary, Cogent Power, based in the UK, is a specialty provider of grain-oriented electrical steel, non-oriented electrical steels and transformer cores.
For more information, visit: https://www.tatasteel.com/
