Coventry’s Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC)(www.the-mtc.org) and Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) (www.ljmu.ac.uk) are to create a new centre of excellence in innovative technology.

The new Business Launch Centre MTC will be established at the LJMU Faculty of Technology and Environment on Merseyside.

It will encourage collaborative partnerships that take new ideas coming out of academia and develop them into commercial reality. A spokesman said: “It will provide a ‘one-stop shop’ for business and product incubation, manufacture and commercialisation for the maritime industry. It will help businesses to access new funding streams and point them towards the potential of emerging technologies.

“The Liverpool City Region has one of the largest clusters of maritime businesses in Europe, and Manufacturing Technology Centres are seen as an important part of the UK’s innovation system. LJMU hosts one of the oldest nautical institutions in the UK, having served the sector with innovative technology since 1892.”

Professor Nigel Weatherill, LJMU Vice-Chancellor, said: “This is an exceptional opportunity for the region’s maritime and logistics sector. It will both support and accelerate the establishment and early-stage development of the Liverpool Global Maritime Knowledge Hub by providing the proven knowledge-exchange infrastructure
at the intersection between the Mersey Maritime business sector and LJMU’s specialist maritime education.

Training, research and global connections will result in cluster-based knowledge-transfer programmes, innovation support and increased growth, job creation and job security in one of the most competitive of international market-places.”

LJMU is also a founding partner in the creation and roll-out of a Mersey Maritime Skills Federation, which is due to be launched in the autumn following a partnership agreement with Mersey Maritime. Meanwhile, the MTC is collaborating with Rolls-Royce on a project that involves the production of the largest-ever civil aero engine part using 3-D printing technology.

The component — a front-bearing housing the size of a tractor wheel — has been tested on a Trent XWB-97 engine that will power the Airbus A350-1000 aircraft. The 1.5m-diameter titanium part contains 48 aero-foils — also produced by 3-D printing.