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Defence Science and Technology and the UK’s Defence and Security Accelerator have partnered to support international collaboration between Australian businesses and UK counterparts to better integrate advanced materials onto military platforms.
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Australian businesses are urged to join others and bid for work in an international collaboration with the UK. The Australian government is encouraging tenders for “A Joint Effort – Integrating Advanced Materials onto Military Platforms – Stage 2”.
Stage 2, “A Joint Effort”, is looking for innovative joining technologies that enable the use of advanced materials and/or designs on military platforms in land, sea and air environments. It is being run collaboratively as part of ongoing partnership in Science and Technology within Defence.
In Australia, participation is being led by Defence Science and Technology Group (DST Group) and the Small Business Innovation Research for Defence (SBIRD), part of the Next Generation Technologies Fund. In the UK, participation is led by Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL).
The competition will be managed by the UK’s Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA) and funded collaboratively by both nations. Stage 2 will be looking for developed proposals beginning at a TRL 2-3 to test the technology/innovation in a laboratory setting against an application.
Advanced materials offer significant benefits to military capability; for example, through increased functionality, improved survivability, enhanced maintainability and reduced through-life cost. Military platforms across all operating domains (land, sea and air) need to incorporate an increasingly diverse range of materials to meet the complex and demanding requirements of the armed forces.
In order to exploit these benefits, advanced materials often need to be accommodated within existing designs or retro-fitted onto an existing platform, leading to a combination of materials and sub-systems on a single platform.
Consequently, joints and interfaces will often have challenging characteristics such as sharp changes in mechanical and mechanical properties, stress raisers, reduced structural integrity or susceptibility to environmental degradation.
These issues are exacerbated by the diverse and intense operating environments that a military platform will be exposed to during a typical operational lifetime, including environments that were not considered during manufacture.
Therefore, joining techniques must be robust, reliable and ideally tailorable to a range of operating scenarios. We are interested in creating and maintaining joints and interfaces, not just during manufacture, but throughout the platform life cycle.
Repair processes, whether emergency repairs on the front line or part of planned maintenance, must also keep up with advances in the manufacturing techniques used for the original structure. Innovations could either reduce the complexity or cost of repair processes or allow greater flexibility in the materials/components being repaired.
The technical scope remains unchanged from Stage 1. We are seeking innovative technologies that will help to expedite the insertion of advanced materials into platforms, through innovations in joining technologies.
SBIRD and DASA are seeking proposals that will deliver innovations in joining technology to enable the use of advanced materials on military platforms. Innovations should address the challenging demands of the defence environment and must therefore:
- Improve the durability of structures and joints to reduce failure and maintainability issues;
- Enable new design choices to be made for future military platforms to maintain a capability advantage;
- Provide new routes to create and manage joints across the life cycle of a military platform.
There is total funding of up to $1 million available in Stage 2 of the topic within Australia; applications from other nations should refer to the UK documentation on the DASA website.
The topic closes at 23:00 (Eastern Daylight Savings Time), 12:00 (Midday) Greenwich Mean Time on Friday, 31 January 2020. Topic queries, including on process, application, technical, commercial and intellectual property aspects, should be sent to
Specific questions relating to the submission process should be directed to
