Abstract
The readership of the journal is drawn from a wide range of backgrounds, and one of the roles of the journal is to inform readers of important trends in engineering with occasional themed issues. The following three articles explain the growing practice of companies contracting for performance together with an explanation of research undertaken in universities and industry to underpin through-life support.
The first article is by Professor Raj Roy and his colleagues at Cranfield University, where Professor Roy is Director of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Through-life Engineering Services (TES) hosted jointly by Cranfield University and Durham University. EPSRC and industry jointly fund the centre. The article describes the economic importance for the United Kingdom of the contracts that are a dominant feature of the aerospace and defence sectors, and are set to grow with the rapid growth of air fleets in Asia. The article then describes the various types of service required for the contracts and the research currently being undertaken to support and mitigate the risk attached to such contracts.
The second article is contributed by Durham and Cranfield and deals with the concept of self-healing systems. This reflects a shift in thinking in the strategy of repair away from predicted failure mechanisms to an autonomous response to failures that may be unexpected. This will not only serve the growing numbers of systems with a high degree of autonomy but can also draw on the research undertaken to design systems with a high degree of autonomy (readers may care to look back at the themed issue of May 2012).
The third article from Roke describes how the use of surface waves could reduce the cost of through-life support by replacement of cables with a more resilient form of communication and also by offering a complementary form of structural health monitoring over a wide area.