TWI's Technology Roadmap is a strategic representation of where we will prioritise investments into technology capabilities to meet our Member needs over the next 10 years.
It was developed in response to cross-sector demand for systems manufactured by welding, joining and coating that are safe and sustainable, combined with a desire to accelerate the commercial application of new technology to gain competitive advantage, enable net zero, and create societal benefit.
The Roadmap integrates our various investments into a single programme that unites our people and laboratories in pursuit of resolving Member needs via leading technology, engineering excellence and technology translation into industrial practice. The Roadmap is built on five fundamental, cross-cutting building blocks:
- people with knowledge of current industrial material challenges and the skills to address them;
- deep collective understanding of the materials science of manufacture, failure avoidance and defect management;
- generation and use of industrially applicable data;
- pragmatic, standard approaches to quality and safety, built on shared learning from experience;
- automation enabled by software and robotics
Funding the Roadmap
Delivering the Technology Roadmap requires strategic planning and adequate funding. Each capability within the Roadmap has a tailored funding approach to ensure we develop the required expertise within the target timeline. At TWI we employ four distinct funding steams; Core Research Programme, Institute investment, capital expenditure and government funding.
- Core Research Programme: Co-investment of Members’ subscriptions to expand our collective knowledge
- Corporate Investment: Co-investment of retained profits to create and expand new delivery capabilities
- Capital Expenditure: Co-investment from P&L to maintain and expand our engineering laboratories
- Government Funding: Co-investment from government to leverage and scale our joint investment
This targeted approach allows us to be deliver Member value by maximising our technical knowhow. Our Technology Roadmap leverages our 100-year experience and existing expertise, whilst defining the next steps in TWI’s technical development journey.
Roadmap Themes
The Technology Roadmap is split into three over-arching themes - Structural Integrity for Safety and Sustainability, Validating Reliability of Novel Manufacturing Techniques, and Inspection, Monitoring and End of Life.
Each of these themes includes sub-sections that cover areas of existing and future technologies to be developed in the short term (under 2 years), medium term (2-5 years) and long term (5+ years).