SDE Technology seeks automotive expert’s guidance to enhance aluminium parts production

SDE Technology recently welcomed Robert Joyce as its inaugural non-executive advisor. With a wealth of experience as a supply chain specialist at renowned companies such as BMW, Rover and Jaguar Land Rover, Joyce is a highly respected expert in the automotive industry.

SDE Technology believes this will enhance the company’s aluminium components-making abilities while creating 20 new job opportunities. The Shrewsbury-based manufacturer has a distinct client base of renowned carmakers for whom it provides precisely engineered pressings and assemblies.

Robert Joyce will be responsible for the company’s new venture into modernistic ideas, including electrification and lighter components that create the latest car shapes.

The managing director of SDE Technology, Richard Homden, stated: “This is a fantastic move for us and gives us access to one of the best experts in the automotive sector.”

“Robert will help us achieve the ambitious growth targets we have set and will accelerate our investment plans. It is great to see both the vision he has for us, but also his enthusiasm for business and the way he perceives problems as mere tasks that must be overcome and ones that can indeed aid us to our end goal,” he added.

Richard seemed quite optimistic: “We are looking forward to exciting times ahead, and that includes a recruitment push for twenty new roles between now and 2026.”

SDE Technology, one of the UK’s biggest manufacturers of pressings and assemblies, currently employs more than 100 heads at its factory on Brixton Way.

The company’s Hot Form Quench (HFQ®) process is a thermal forming process for extracting high-strength aluminium components for application in the aviation, automotive and renewable industries. These hot-pressed aluminium parts play a vital role in giving a car designer the freedom to culminate his most desired ideas into reality.

HFQ® is essential for delivering aluminium parts with absolute precision and lightweight qualities, and the company is now thinking about maximising its productivity. SDE Technology has been dealing with all the ongoing geopolitical anomalies like the pandemic, lockdown, chip shortages and augmented energy costs but has never overlooked its responsibilities to the automotive industry.

The company has developed a way of producing structurally accurate components in six and seven-thousand series alloys that cannot be formed cold. It has been proven that the HFQ® technique can reduce the required parts by perfectly producing a unanimous body. Since HFQ® is compatible with higher-strength aluminium, it is usually recommended for the vehicle safety cell in the automotive department and has also been used to manufacture a prototype aircraft armrest.

Richard Homden explained: “HFQ® was developed by Impression Technologies (ITL), who industrialised research by Birmingham University and Imperial College London. This is a great example of British research being utilised by British manufacturing.

“You simply cannot form this high-strength aluminium in any other way unless you use a Super Plastic Forming process. Even then, SPF makes one part every 15 to 20 minutes, whereas the cycle time for our technology is one part every 15 to 20 seconds. That is a design and manufacturing dream,” he concluded.