AMRC North West Is Bringing Industrial 3D Printing to Lancashire

Blackburn is not the first place that comes to mind when you think of advanced manufacturing. The town in Lancashire was once a cotton-spinning hub. Today, the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre North West is trying to make it a hub for something else: additive manufacturing.

The centre's Head of Additive Manufacturing, Evren Yasa, puts the mission plainly. The goal is to help UK manufacturers adopt AM technologies. That sounds simple. The hard part is moving a process from a laboratory demonstration to a qualified, repeatable shop-floor operation.

Defence and Aerospace First

AMRC North West works at the intersection of academia and industry. It matures additive processes through government and privately funded projects. Its neighbours include BAE Systems, and the centre collaborates with both local SMEs and international partners. The work is focused on applications where AM delivers something that conventional manufacturing cannot match: complex geometries, low-volume production, or weight reduction in high-performance structures.

The centre also benefits from being part of the wider AMRC network. Yasa describes strong synergy with the composites group, which uses AM to produce complex tooling geometries, and with the machining group, which optimizes subtractive post-processing. That combination matters. Printed parts often need machining to manage residual stresses and control distortion. Having both capabilities under one roof reduces the friction between design intent and production reality.

Closing the Skills Gap

One of the centre's practical contributions is training. The UK has a shortage of engineers who understand both the design freedom of additive manufacturing and the qualification requirements of regulated industries. AMRC North West runs funded support programmes for manufacturers across Lancashire, giving companies access to expertise and equipment they could not justify buying on their own.

The shared prosperity funding model means a small engineering firm can test a metal AM process for an aerospace bracket or a medical component without committing to a seven-figure machine purchase. That lowers the barrier to entry and gives the centre a steady stream of real industrial problems to solve.

The Wider Picture

The UK has invested heavily in additive manufacturing over the last decade. Universities in Nottingham, Sheffield and Cambridge have attracted significant funding because they already had established expertise. Concentrating resources in strong centres is often the right approach. It builds critical mass. It also makes it harder to tell whether a new project is genuinely novel or a continuation of existing work under a different name.

AMRC North West's role is to turn research output into production capability. That means qualification, repeatability and cost modelling, not just interesting prototypes. The photographs on its walls are all additively manufactured components, a reminder that the goal is not to demonstrate what is possible, but to make what is possible reliable enough to build a business around.