Contributor: Victoria Ham, WMG Marketing Officer

The Advanced Propulsion Centre (APC) has entered its 10th year of operation and our Head of Business Development, Dyrr Ardash sat down with Dan Bunting, Business Development Manager for the APC to take a look back at just a few of the incredible collaborative projects WMG and APC have worked on together over the past few years and the on-going development of the two centres.

Despite the fact that WMG and the APC share a facility, the two entities are not exclusive and are entirely independent organisations. This helps create a level of impartial integrity when it comes to the APC’s funding competitions, meaning WMG have to apply just like all other organisations.

To date, WMG has secured £25m of funding from the APC and have collaborated on 17 projects. A significant amount more has been spread around WMG’s network of partners, collaborators, and suppliers. Projects have covered a huge range of technologies, including lightweight vehicle and power structures, energy storage, energy management, electric machines, and power electronics, said Ardash. “It’s a long history together, which has had a positive impact on us both.” Ardash goes on to say, “The intention of WMG is to bring academia and industry together, and it’s essentially what APC also stands for,”

But it isn’t just about enabling funding for businesses, the APC is also heavily involved in helping businesses form collaborative relationships. "The APC is very proactive in helping form the best collaborations to deliver the best projects for the UK," said Bunting. “These collaborations are driven by APC's influential roadmaps that highlight a particular challenge and how industry can come together to solve it. That's how these projects take shape.”

One of the most exciting APC-funded projects is ELEVATION, an £18m project to accelerate the development of a modular luxury battery-electric vehicle platform and associated technologies. The investment, recently announced by the Department for Business and Trade (DBT), aims to accelerate the shift to net zero with an investment in vehicle light-weighting, a digital toolchain and electrification training. Specifically, the partners will seek to address the technical challenges of developing a lightweight, 800V traction battery pack and twin front Electric Drive Unit (EDU) into a modular BEV platform. While focusing on Aston Martin's supercar, the high-power, modular unit could be applied to SUVs, broadening its appeal to those with more modest budgets. WMG's role focuses on designing, manufacturing, and life cycle analysis of the modular structural composite battery enclosure.

Researchers at the WMG’s Materials Engineering Centre (MEC) will also investigate automated high-volume composite manufacturing of hybrid structures using existing tooling.

You can read more about the incredible collaborative history with WMG & APC by checking out the latest issue of FutureVehicle.