WP1: Student_Centred CNC Facility

The University of Plymouth is looking to reinforce its reputation as an innovative centre of excellence for engineering research, teaching and learning. The new Engineering and Design facility (NEDF) being constructed on the western edge of the main Plymouth campus will provide a new home for the specialist laboratories and teaching facilities of the School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics and the School of Art, Design and Architecture. NEDF integrates a fully refurbished Babbage Building with a new-build, wrap-around area to create more than 10,000m² of research laboratories and teaching spaces. New, state-of-the-art resources are planned that will enable engineering teaching and research to underpin the fourth industrial revolution and complement existing equipment. The new building and its physical resources will inspire the development of new inter-disciplinary activities in teaching, learning and research, and nurture the innovative graduate engineers demanded by future society. The objective here is to create a new machining facility that can be used and operated by our engineering students. To this end, we wish to install a suite of CNC lathes and mills designed specifically for educational and training contexts that are fully integrated with easy-to-use CADCAM software tools.