The Department benefits from the concentration of aerospace industry in the south-west of England and a key feature of the Department's research is its close links with the industry - including Airbus, Rolls-Royce, AgustaWestland, BAE Systems and others further afield.

The Department has also seen burgeoning links with the renewable energy industry. Some of these research links have led to the establishment of formal technology partnerships; the Rolls-Royce University Technology Centre in Composites, the AgustaWestland Helicopters University Technology Centre in Vibration, and a composites technology partnership with Vestas Wind Systems.

The result of this close relationship with industry, associated with substantial research funding from other UK and EU sources, is that the Department's research is industrially relevant and at the leading edge of the aerospace sector as reflected by the high proportion of research found to be internationally excellent and world-leading in the 2008 UK Government Research Assessment Exercise.

We have good collaborative links with organisations such as EADS Innovation Works and DSTL (Defence Science & Technology Laboratory). We are also a founding members of the UK Applied Aerodynamics Consortium, and partners in the Centre for Fluid Mechanics Simulation (CFMS).

We have strong international links with numerous European partners via current EU FP7 grants:

• Future Fast Aeroelastic Simulation Technologies (FFAST),
• Marie Curie Initial Training Network - Self-Healng Materials (SHeMat),

and previous funding such as:

• FP7 Marie Curie Excellence Grant on Morphing Aircraft,
• FP6 project Chiral Smart Honeycomb (CHISMACOMB)

International interest from non-academic centres includes:

• NASA Langley
• Los Alamos National Laboratories
• the US Air Force.