Metal processing is a vital component of manufacturing. Manufacturing is the third largest sector in the UK economy and in 2010 manufacturing in the United Kingdom accounted for 8.2% of the workforce and 12% (£150 billion in gross value added) of the country's national output. However, manufacturing's share of nominal GDP has fallen from over 22 per cent in 1990 and there is a clear trend in low value, high volume manufacturing moving to developing countries while in the UK the higher technology areas generate the better gross value added returns. The future growth of the sector is dependent on its ability to design and make the high value products. In large part, it is the high quality knowledge base and skilled technical workforce that make for a successful transformation from a resource and labour-intensive to a knowledge-intensive sector and ensure that high technology metal industries flourish in the UK. An important aspect of supporting high-value manufacturing in the UK is the PhD training of young researchers. However, it has been pointed out by many companies in the UK that the lack of well-trained materials engineers remains a concern for high value manufacturing industry. Indeed, in 2013 the UK Border Agency identified "metallurgist" as one of the 10 most wanted job titles in the Codes of Practice for Skilled workers. In this proposal, the Universities of Leicester, Birmingham and Nottingham seek funding to establish an EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Innovative Metal Processing (CIMP) with substantial support from industrial partners. Over the lifetime of the CIMP we will train over 87 PhD researchers with the combination of experimental, analytical, computational, technology management and transferable skills that are needed to build industrial innovation. The Centre will recruit students from different disciplines and provide them with coherent knowledge of a range of metal processing technologies and develop their expertise in solving challenging and industrially relevant problems so that they can be deployed by industry and become future leaders. The overall emphasis of the CDT's training programme will be on producing well-rounded leaders of the future, combining critical expertise in their discipline areas with a well-honed professional acumen, culminating in the ability to explore the wider context of their work and its potential impact, communicate their research to a range of different audiences, understand the commercial world and the applications of research, and work effectively with a range of partners both within and outside the academic community. The main research aims are: (1) to provide a deep understanding of the physical phenomena during metal processing, (2) to develop analytical and computational models for metal processing, (3) to design and optimise reliable manufacturing processes to accelerate product development and (4) to design new processes for novel materials. CIMP will build on the relationships the universities already have with our industrial partners and augment those relationships over the longer term by building a shared vision of researcher and continuing professional training and developing a deeper understanding of the challenges that drive innovation and impact in metal processing. Our marketing and recruiting activities will promote the profile of the metal processing industry in the UK and help attract a talented workforce. Our Summer School will also have an outreach activity "targeting" secondary school students to engage them in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects and especially to inspire women and girls to pursue (STEM) as pathways to exciting and fulfilling careers.

The DigitalMetal CDT is born out to meet a national, strategic need for training a new generation of technical leaders able to lead digital transformation of metals industry & its supply chain with the objective of increasing agility, productivity & international competitiveness of the metals industry in the UK. The metals industry is a vital component of the UK's manufacturing economy and makes a significant contribution to key strategic sectors such as construction, aerospace, automotive, energy, defence and medical, directly contributing £20bn to UK GDP, and underpins over £190bn manufacturing GDP. Without a new cadre of leaders in digital technologies, equipped to transform discoveries and breakthroughs in metals and manufacturing (M&M) technologies into products, the UK risks entering another cycle of world-leading innovation but losing the benefits arising from exploitation to more capable and better prepared global competitors. The evolution to Industry 4.0 and Materials 4.0 coupled with unprecedented opportunities of "big data" enable the uptake of artificial intelligence/deep learning (AI/DL) based solutions, making it feasible to implement zero-defects, right first-time manufacturing/zero-waste (ZDM/ZW) concepts and meet the environmental-, sustainable- and societal- challenges. However, to fully take advantage of these opportunities, two critical challenges must be addressed. First, as user-identified problems in the metals industry that spans domains (from discoveries in M&M to their up-scaling and deployment in high volume/value production), urgently needed a new breed of engineers with skills to traverse these domains by going beyond the classical PhD training, i.e., T-model signifying transferable skills and in-depth knowledge in a single domain, to a new Pi-model raining that is underpinned by transferable skills and in-depth knowledge that transverse across domains i.e.,: AI/DL and engineering (M&M) to enable rapid exploitation of discoveries in M&M. Second, while AI/DL domain provides data-driven correlation analysis critical for product performance and defect identification, it is insufficient for root cause analysis (causality). This necessitates training on integrating data-driven with physics-based models of product & production, which is currently lacking in the metals industry. The Midlands region, as the top contributor to UK Gross Value Added through metals and metal products, with world-leading companies, such as Rolls-Royce and Constellium, LEAR and their customers, underpinned through collaborations with the five Midlands universities: Birmingham, Leicester, Loughborough, Nottingham & Warwick, is uniquely positioned to integrate research and industry resources and train a new cadre of engineers & researchers on the Pi-model to address user-needs. Our vision is to train future leaders able to accelerate the exploitation of M&M discoveries using digital technology to enable defect-free, right first-time manufacturing at reduced costs, digitise to decarbonise, and implement fuel switching in metals manufacturing industry.