Cover story: The front line of innovation

There can be few more demanding tasks for design engineers than designing for defence applications. Here, not only are there all the usual trials and tribulations of product design, but allied to these is the fact that the product is going to face incredibly arduous conditions and that its success or failure will have life or death consequences. One company that has faced these issues many times is leading engineering consultancy Ricardo, which has many years' experience in this field, having worked extensively on both the Land Rover Defender platform and, more recently, on the Foxhound Light Protected Patrol Vehicle (LPPV) chosen to replace it. Chris Barnes, Ricardo's global product group director for defence vehicles, was intimately involved with these projects and has a number of observations to make on the challenges involved in working in this sector. One of the most significant of these, he believes is the speed with which it is often necessary to turn defence projects around. "The fact that a lot of military vehicles are UORs [Urgent Operational Requirements]," he says, "makes the situation extremely dynamic and fast-moving. If you're a designer working for Ford on the new Transit, it will be a four or five-year process where you know the stages you're going to go through over those years and you move from gateway to gateway. A military programme is far more diverse and far more fast-moving because the only reason the budget has been signed off is because you're under pressure to get the vehicle into theatre quickly. You have to counter a specific threat level. You have to go through all the same processes that other automotive companies do, but you have to do it much more quickly and therefore much more dynamically. "If you take an automotive manufacturer," he continues, "they have a very detailed gateway quality assurance process that may be four or five years in duration. Typically in defence applications, you don't have that timescale, but you still have to be able to ensure you can get quality assured products to the market. So another key element for us is to take what we know in the automotive arena in terms of the quality approach and apply that in defence while using digital tools to significantly shorten the timescales." These digital tools (which involve early CAE analysis on body and chassis structures, durability and performance assessment, acceleration, noise vibration characteristics and everything around thermal performance criteria and then vehicle dynamics) are designed with one aim in mind – to try and reduce the number of physical prototypes required and get to a design solution as early as possible to try and discern whether the design concept we have meets the performance criteria defined in the requirements document. Says Barnes: "In the commercial automotive sector you can have as many as 200-300 prototypes on a new platform. You simply can't do that with a military vehicle. You have to get to a physical concept level as fast as possible while minimising your spend on physical hardware – you simply do not have the funds to fund a huge prototype fleet. You have to rely heavily on digital tools, ensure the users have their requirements set as early as possible and then be able to move that quickly forward into the production environment." The challenge, he claims, often starts with the failure to ensure clarity at the very beginning and the sheer number of variations required. He says: "They'll often start with a very vague set of requirements and they don't generally get that much more defined. Also, you've got multiple end users – special forces, logistics, front line troops – all of whom have different requirements." It was this requirement for differing users that led Ricardo and partner Force Protection to opt for a modular design on the Foxhound Project. However, this confusion in terms of liaison and brief need not necessarily be the case in defence applications. An example of an 'Urgent Operational Need' design that has so far managed to avoid some of these pitfalls can be found in the collaboration between Cambridge Design Partnership and the MoD in the design of a battlefield oxygen generator. Getting oxygen to casualties on the front line within the first hour dramatically improves their chances of survival. At the moment, their best option for that is using an oxygen cylinder, but these present a number of problems: the first is that they are heavy; the second is that they're pressurised to 200-300bar and are incredibly dangerous if they are hit by shrapnel or a round of ammunition. Thus, as things stand, because of the issue of weight and the danger, oxygen is not there in that crucial 'golden hour'. Cambridge Design Partnership responded to this need with a proposal for an oxygen concentrator solution. Stephen Lamb, a consultant at CDP explains the key innovation of the invention, saying: "Oxygen concentrators are already quite widely used already and are widely proven. And many of the portable oxygen concentrators are powered by batteries. But, because they're relatively powerful devices, you need a large, heavy battery to power them and you want it to have more than one hour's duration. The innovation here was to use diesel, which is the standard military fuel type, to power a small engine to replace the heavy batteries – making the whole solution lighter, smaller and safer." The result is a source of oxygen that can run for hours on less than a litre of diesel fuel. There is also the potential to use the compact engine as an electrical power generator. This could power emergency lighting or patient monitoring instruments. The weight saving achieved by this method is significant. Typically, an off-the-shelf oxygen concentrator powered by batteries would be 8 or 9kg, while this solution is able to reduce that to 3kg. Clearly, the design criteria for such a system are hugely affected by its status as a battlefield project. Says Lamb: "The two fundamental driving design factors – weight and safety – are directly derived from the scenario being on the front line. Now obviously this differs from a civilian application in that, in the civilian world, weight would not be so crucial as it's not being carried in someone's rucksack and you're certainly not being shot at most of the time! So equally, a high pressure system wouldn't be a problem in a civilian application, but certainly is when you're on the front line. If you were, for example, a paramedic in an ambulance, then these issues of a pressurised container and weight would not be problems. But weight and safety concerns arise purely because of the military nature of the application." Additional environmental factors unfamiliar to civilian applications also had to be taken into account. Says Lamb: "In terms of our work in the lab and design work, the early proof of principle stage is fairly similar to other applications, but the long-term implications for our design are very much altered by the fact that it's a military product. So weight needed to be much lower and robustness was crucial. It needs to be safe and much, much simpler to use than normal products. You also need heat emissions from the product to be much, much lower because you want the infrared (IR) signature as low as possible. Another challenge was presented by the likely proximity of the system to helicopters, as Lamb explains: "It would be usual for a casualty to be evacuated by helicopter and, when a helicopter lands, you have enormous amounts of dust and wind swirling around the casualty and the equipment. Now we have to make sure that the air that's sucked in both by the engine and the oxygen concentrator is filtered to ensure it doesn't damage the system. That's a factor that comes about solely because it is a military device." For all these complicating factors, however, one area where CDP has not faced the same difficulties outlined by Chris Barnes of Ricardo is in the liaison process. This was because the process involved the Ministry Of Defence's Centre for Defence Enterprise (CDE) as the single point of contact with the MoD. CDE, part of the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), is based at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in order to be open and transparent to the wider science and research communities and to act as the first point of contact for anyone who wishes to submit a research idea with a defence application. Says Stephen Lamb: "The CDE are actually quite good at making sure we go through them as a main point of contact. They often bring people with them to look at the design – sometimes front line medics, sometimes surgeons from a medical point of view. Sometimes they're from an organisation called MERT [Medical Evacuation and Rescue Team], but also from more senior generals and people involved with equipment acquisition with the MoD. There is a whole range of people we actually interface with via CDE." A single point of contact The Centre for Defence Enterprise (CDE) is part of the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), is based at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in order to be open and transparent to the wider science and research communities and to act as the first point of contact for anyone who wishes to submit a research idea with a defence application. Since its launch in 2008, it has received 2000+ proposals of which over 200 have been approved for funding at a total value of more than £14m. CDE emphasises open innovation and attracting new suppliers from non-traditional areas, in particular small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), academia (university departments and spin-out companies) and innovators. These are the sorts of potential suppliers who would normally be put off by the costs of entering a new market, particularly given the bureaucratic image of traditional defence procurement. CDE is largely web based at www.science.mod.uk/enterprise and using a secure online proposal and assessment portal. This allows simple proposal submission which highlights important aspects of an innovation but also allows rapid assessment by experts from across MOD. In most cases a decision can be made within a few weeks of submission. Contracts are typically £20k-100k (a few of the very best get more) for short sharp studies to assess future potential and to inform funding decisions; approximately 50% of contracts go to SMEs. Successful projects may be considered for further funding under the main Defence research and equipment programmes. CDE has two key "products", with all proposals received through the online portal: A standing open call for proposals which allows anyone to submit a proposal at any time; these proposals are assessed on a monthly basis. Themed calls address a specific requirement with a limited timespan of 6 to 8 weeks. These calls are published on the website and may also be supported by seminars. Individual theme calls can attract up to 100 proposals each. CDE also has a wider mission to educate and stimulate the wider potential supplier base through regular presentations and surgeries around the UK. These provide a broad general insight into MOD's requirements and are particularly recommended for new suppliers; they are also popular networking opportunities. Information and registration for events is available on the CDE website.