After wind and solar energy, tidal energy presents the most prominent opportunity for generating energy from renewable sources. However, due to the harsh environment that tidal turbines are deployed in, a number of design and manufacture challenges are presented to engineers. As a consequence of the harsh environment, the loadings on the turbine blades are much greater than that on wind turbine blades and, therefore, require advanced solutions to be able to survive in this environment. In order to avoid issues with corrosion, tidal turbine blades are mainly manufactured from fibre reinforced polymer composite material. As a result, the main design and manufacture challenges are related to the main structural aspects of the blade, which are the spar and root, and the connection between the blade and the turbine hub. Therefore, in this paper, a range of advanced manufacturing technologies for producing a 1 MW tidal turbine blade are developed. The main novelty in this study comes with the challenges that are overcome due to the size of the blade, resulting in thickness composite sections (> 130 mm in places), the fast changes in geometry over a short length that isn’t the case for wind blades and the required durability of the material in the marine environment. These advances aim to increase the likelihood of survival of tidal turbine blades in operation for a design life of 20 + years.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, global health services have faced unprecedented demands. Many key workers in health and social care have experienced crippling shortages of personal protective equipment, and clinical engineers in hospitals have been severely stretched due to insufficient supplies of medical devices and equipment. Many engineers who normally work in other sectors have been redeployed to address the crisis, and they have rapidly improvised solutions to some of the challenges that emerged, using a combination of low-tech and cutting-edge methods. Much publicity has been given to efforts to design new ventilator systems and the production of 3D-printed face shields, but many other devices and systems have been developed or explored. This paper presents a description of efforts to reverse engineer or redesign critical parts, specifically a manifold for an anaesthesia station, a leak port, plasticware for COVID-19 testing, and a syringe pump lock box. The insights obtained from these projects were used to develop a product lifecycle management system based on Aras Innovator, which could with further work be deployed to facilitate future rapid response manufacturing of bespoke hardware for healthcare. The lessons learned could inform plans to exploit distributed manufacturing to secure back-up supply chains for future emergency situations. If applied generally, the concept of distributed manufacturing could give rise to “21st century cottage industries” or “nanofactories,” where high-tech goods are produced locally in small batches.