SKY’S THE LIMIT! From toy planes to real aircraft of the future meet AMRC high-flyer Erica Smith
Young Erica Smith loved building toy aeroplanes - now she solves real aircraft manufacturing challenges at the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC), which is celebrating its 25th anniversary, as Graham Walker has been finding out.
Erica Smith started making toy aeroplanes when she was a youngster. Little balsa wood models, carefully built with her dad and grandad.
And, she proudly remembers, they actually flew.
Today, the planes are real – and Erica’s work is helping make the parts better, smarter and more efficient, so millions of us can fly safely on holiday, business trips and travel the world.
It strikes her every time she flies – a reminder of the remarkable work back on the ground at the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC).
"When I get on a plane, I often think I was potentially involved in this," says Erica, aged 39, of Sheffield.
Here, at the AMRC, a world-leading manufacturing research centre in Catcliffe, just off the Sheffield Parkway on the Rotherham-Sheffield border, Erica is an Innovation Fellow in High Volume Manufacturing.
Or, as she puts it: “I solve problems.”
Her journey is one of the many inspiring human stories behind the AMRC, which is celebrating 25 years.
Founded in 2001 by Professor Keith Ridgway and the Yorkshire businessman Adrian Allen, with Boeing as its first major industrial partner, the AMRC started on Rotherham’s Advanced Manufacturing Park.
Its mission is ‘Transforming lives through innovation’, and its 25th anniversary message builds on that ambition: Made here. Made better. Made for the future.
Engineering, it turns out, is in Erica’s blood.
“There are engineers going quite far back in my family,” she says proudly.
Her dad and grandad were engineers. Further back and her ancestor, Thomas Dale, was the Victorian civil engineer who transformed Hull’s waterworks, helping bring clean water to the town.
Yet her own route into manufacturing was because she needed extra cash.
While studying mechanical engineering at university, Erica went to a Jobcentre expecting retail or warehouse work. Instead, it changed her life.
“They said, ‘We’ve got a job in a manufacturing plant.’ I thought, okay, I wasn’t expecting too much," she explained.
“But when I showed up to the interview, they said, ‘Oh, you’re an engineering student. Would you like something that involves a little bit more than standing in a line inspection?’”
She did – and discovered manufacturing was cool.
“I used to think it was a boring engineering thing,” admits Erica.
“But it brings goods, products and engineered goods to people who wouldn’t necessarily be able to afford them unless you can produce things cheaper, more quickly," she says of her job.
Erica joined the AMRC as a project engineer in 2016 and became the person colleagues turned to when something difficult needed figuring out.
“I got a reputation that if there’s a problem going, ask Erica,” she laughs.
One puzzle involved a factory producing around two million gudgeon pins a month for car engines. Tiny imperfections suddenly appeared.
The culprit wasn't the grinding machine, but an 800-ton press nearby. Each time it came down, vibrations affected the grinding process. Rubber floor matting isolated the vibration.
It was classic Erica problem-solving.
At the AMRC that curiosity has been applied to aircraft.
One project involved a landing gear where getting coolant into the right place during machining was difficult and excessive heat risked damage. Erica changed the shape of the coolant nozzle. It worked.
That willingness to ask “what if?” is part of what she loves about the AMRC.
Passing knowledge on matters too.
"It’s essential.We’ve got operators who’ve been doing the job 60 years. In retirement, losing that knowledge is probably one of the biggest issues today," she says.
And if advanced manufacturing sounds remote from everyday life, Erica has an answer.
“Almost everything you use every day is manufactured,” she says.
The little girl making balsa wood planes may have been practising for her future without knowing it.
Today, Erica is solving real-world problems alongside hundreds of researchers, engineers and innovators at an AMRC celebrating 25 years of ideas, innovation and Yorkshire ingenuity.
And if there’s a manufacturing problem that still needs solving?
Call Erica.
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