Industry collaboration wanted for workshop to improve testing in new product development

Manufacturing industries are undergoing massive transformations in restructuring their products and processes by introducing and adopting new technologies to meet NetZero and sustainability targets.

Physical testing is essential to ensure quality and validate a new product. For example, the UK Industrial Decarbonisation Strategy highlights the need for enhanced testing across different uses and stages of new technologies, including low carbon hydrogen production and heat recovery (2021). But testing is often extremely costly, accounting for 30-50% of development costs in automotive or aerospace industries.

Virtual testing facilitates physical testing but the need for physical testing increases as uncertainty arises due to new technology, new manufacturing processes and infrastructure. A critical trade-off is how the cost of physical testing can be reduced without compromising the quality, especially for radical emerging technologies requiring comprehensive testing.

We want to collaborate with industries, gather a more comprehensive understanding of the current practice, identify current challenges, and co-create solutions that benefit both industries and academic research. We want to develop a systematic framework of testing processes in new product development, aiming to digitalise the testing process in the future.

To do this, we’d like to invite those involved in product design, verification and validation, testing (virtual and physical) and systems engineering in automotive, aerospace and other manufacturing industries to a forthcoming workshop in June.

Dr Khadija Tahera
Lecturer in Operations and Supply Chain Management