Miscellaneous general and special-purpose machinery

Tender description

The National Composites Centre intends to procure equipment to provide an Automated Composites Integrity Capability to be used for manufacturing research and development purposes. The functional requirements for the capability are being confirmed with the industry. It is envisaged that the equipment will deliver a state of the art and flexible automated non-destructive testing (NDT) and metrology cell for predominantly composite components and assemblies with an operating envelope of 10m x 5m x 5m with the option to extend the linear length from 10m to 20m. The key technologies required initially are ultrasonic (UT) NDT, including a smaller component water immersion tank, shearography NDT, thermography NDT and non-contact metrology using photogrammetry. These may be new systems sourced as part of this procurement or the use of existing manual equipment. A key feature of the capability is integration of different inspection technologies into an automated system and the requirement to be flexible and allow future off-the-shelf inspection equipment to be added and integrated.