The Composites Innovation Cluster (CiC), a collaborative programme awarded over £11M from the Government funded Advanced Manufacturing Supply Chain Initiative, can celebrate some early success with 12 jobs created and 4 safeguarded in Q1. 

Over its duration, the CiC will deliver 13 integrated capability projects across 25 partners and will aim to deliver a holistic supply chain model which will extend throughout the composites community. £22M of joint funding from AMSCI Round 2 & Industry will support the creation and safeguarding of over 200 jobs over the 3 years of the programme. The funding will also create £190M growth by addressing market failures which challenge the wider adoption of Composites in the UK markets.

Early technical success will be showcased at the Composites Engineering Show, 12-13 November 2013, in 2 dedicated open forum sessions. The first session, on Tuesday 12th November at 2pm in open forum 4 will highlight key strategic achievements so far as well as progress made in the COMP-FORE project.

This project will create a sustainable model of the composites supply chain that will allow companies to make realistic engineering decisions on technology insertion to strengthen the UK supply chain, based on real-world economic data as well as the technical merits of that technology. 

The second session on Wednesday 13th November at 3pm in open forum 3 will focus on developments in the UK-BIOCOMP project which aims to develop the materials & process technologies necessary to manufacture the novel biopregs via an integrated continuous process. The overall goal of the project is to deliver bio-composite components to Primes that truly compete with glass fibre composites.