SW Best Practice Club visit to CWIC
The CEWales South West Wales Best Practice Club paid a visit to CWIC (Construction Wales Innovation Centre) located at the University of Wales Trinity Saint Davids on Thursday 16th January.
The group were given a quick tour of the newly constructed innovation matrix, some hands-on passive house airtightness sealing in the CWIC demonstration/training workshops, followed by a visit to the Architectural and Construction department for a chat with current students and a talk about the 3D scanning/LIDAR digital technology.
The new innovation Matrix building was built with some ' City Deal' funding as an incubator for small businesses/start-ups. All of the businesses occupying the office spaces are encouraged to have close links with teaching and research at UWTSD. Innovation Matrix | University of Wales Trinity Saint David. The building offers flexible office space, meeting/conference rooms, a central atrium with breakout space and cafe.
The CWIC workshop offers training for tradesperson and professionals is passive House style construction methods, as well as undertaken research and testing on in the form of test modules. There are a number of example timber frame rigs that we used under the guidance of senior lecturer Ian Brown to test Air tightness sealing methods in a 'new build' and 'retrofit' scenario. CWIC offers training for all persons within the construction industry which many of our members and their supply chains will likely benefit from. These are often fully or part funded, so worth exploring.
UWTSD 'Architecture, Construction, and Environment (ACE)' currently offers a Part 1 Architectural studies and a construction course which is delivered with input from CWIC. It was good to get an insight into the current student work from lecturers Ryan Stuckey and Gavin Traylor.
The 3D Scanning/LIDAR work undertaken by Matthew Drummond showed the options available for surveying complex buildings. Some examples were show of city-wide scans and complex listed buildings using both static and drone mounted LIDAR. This technology is being adopted in many applications and offers the ability to create digital twins of a building for record/archiving, performance monitoring and development purposes.
Thanks to all those attended. If any further information is required about training for tradespersons, professionals or the other services, then please feel free to contact Julie Evans (julie.evans@uwtsd.ac.uk).