About AVIC Manufacturing Technology Institute

AVIC Manufacturing Technology Institute

The AVIC Manufacturing Technology Institute is a comprehensive research institute for aeronautical manufacturing technology, materials and equipment, based in Chaoyang District, Beijing, under the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC). Founded in May 1957 as the Ninth Research Institute of the Second Ministry of Machinery Industry, it was long known as the Beijing Aeronautical Manufacturing Technology Research Institute (BAMTRI) before taking its present name in December 2016. Aircraft design institutes decide what an aeroplane will be; this institute decides how it can be made — the welding, forming, machining, joining and additive processes without which a design remains a drawing. In Chinese its name is Zhongguo Hangkong Zhizao Jishu Yanjiuyuan, and its website is published through AVIC.

Origins: the Ninth Research Institute, 1957

The institute traces its origins to the Ninth Research Institute of the Second Ministry of Machinery Industry, founded in May 1957, in the decade when China was creating its aviation industry with Soviet-pattern institutions — separate research institutes for airframes, engines, materials and, in this case, manufacturing technology. That founding specialism was prescient: as aircraft grew more complex, the limiting factor in aviation programmes repeatedly proved to be not design but producibility, and an institute devoted to manufacturing technology held the keys to turning prototypes into production aircraft.

In time the Ninth Institute became the Beijing Aeronautical Manufacturing Technology Research Institute, the name under which it worked for most of its history and under which it appears in decades of international reporting — Flight International, for example, recorded in 1999 four research and development cooperation contracts between United Technologies and the Beijing Aeronautical Manufacturing Technology Research Institute, on programmes mixing Pratt & Whitney and Sikorsky work, at a time when AVIC I had absorbed 31 of China's 34 aeronautical research institutes. In December 2016 it was renamed the AVIC Manufacturing Technology Institute, the name it uses today, aligning its title with its group parent, the Aviation Industry Corporation of China. A contemporary AVIC journal notice recorded the establishment under the new name at the start of 2017.

Scale, parent and leadership

The institute is a subsidiary — a member unit — of AVIC, China's state-owned aviation industry group, and is described as a comprehensive research institute in the field of aeronautical manufacturing technologies, materials and equipment in China. As of 2018 it had more than 800 individual members, and its leadership listing published by the institute named Li Zhiqiang as its president. Its base is in Chaoyang District, in the east of Beijing, the district where much of AVIC's Beijing research establishment is concentrated.

Manufacturing research differs from the other aviation disciplines in its client base: the institute serves every AVIC programme that must be built, military and civil alike, rather than a single aircraft type. Its organisation list shows a structure built around technology centres and key laboratories shared across the group, together with a Beijing International Science and Technology Cooperation Base of Aviation Manufacturing Technology and High-end Special Equipment — the platform through which its international research relationships, described below, are organised.

Laboratories and technology centres

The institute's published organisation list is a map of aeronautical manufacturing itself. It hosts the State Key Laboratory of High Energy Beam Processing Technology — the energy-beam processes, laser and electron beam among them, used for precision welding, cutting and additive manufacture of aerospace alloys. It hosts the National Defense Science and Technology Industry Special Welding Innovation Center, and aviation science and technology key laboratories for aviation welding and connection technology, digital manufacturing technology, plastic forming technology, additive manufacturing, precision manufacturing technology and high-performance electromagnetic windows — the last covering the radar-transparent and electromagnetic structures of modern aircraft.

At Beijing level it maintains the Beijing Key Laboratory of Complex Component Numerical Control Processing Technology and Equipment, the Beijing Key Laboratory of High Energy Beam Incremental Manufacturing Technology and Equipment, the Beijing Key Laboratory of Digital Plastic Forming Technology and Equipment, and the Beijing Friction Welding Technology and Equipment Engineering Technology Research Center. Group-level bodies under its roof include the China Aviation Industry Manufacturing Technology Center, the Research and Development Center of Aviation Special Equipment for the Aviation Industry, a Laser Weapon Technology Center of the Aviation Industry and the Aviation Industry Intelligent Manufacturing Innovation Center, together with an International Joint Research Center for Basic Research of Advanced Aviation Manufacturing Technology. Read as a whole, the list describes an institute whose laboratories cover the complete modern process set: subtractive machining, forming, welding and joining, surface and beam processes, additive manufacturing and the digital systems that integrate them.

Constituent institutes

Two named institutes sit within the AVIC Manufacturing Technology Institute's structure. The Beijing Precision Engineering Institute for Aircraft Industry covers precision engineering for aircraft production, and the Jinan Special Structure Research Institute works on special structures — the composite and specialised structural work also represented in the wider AVIC system by the Institute for Special Structures of Aeronautical Composites, a partner in the institute's international joining work. AVIC High Tech Co., Ltd., the group's listed high-technology company, also appears in the institute's organisation list, reflecting the route by which manufacturing technologies developed in the institute are industrialised and sold.

A 2024 study of AVIC's organisation prepared by BluePath Labs for the China Aerospace Studies Institute placed the China Aviation Manufacturing Technology Institute as its own chapter of the AVIC structure, with AVIC Aviation High-Technology, the Beijing Precision Engineering Institute and the research institute for special structures of aeronautical composites treated under it — external confirmation that the institute functions as a sub-group of AVIC in its own right, not merely a laboratory.

Welding and joining: the TWI partnership

Joining is the institute's signature technology, and its international standing in the field is documented by its partnership with TWI, the Cambridge-based Welding Institute. On 18 September 2017 the AVIC Centre for Materials Joining and Surface Engineering was officially opened at TWI in Cambridge during a visit by a high-ranking AVIC delegation led by executive vice president Xin Guo Zhang, under a five-year research centre agreement between TWI and the AVIC Manufacturing Technology Institute, which TWI described as specialising in aeronautical research in China.

A number of AVIC group companies joined the agreement alongside the institute — AVIC Composite Corporation, AVIC Institute for Special Structures of Aeronautical Composites and AVIC Beijing Precision Engineering Institute for Aircraft Industry — to develop a research-based collaboration in civil aeronautical engineering, explore mutual areas of interest and disseminate scientific information. The partnership focused on generic, near-market materials and manufacturing technology development and technology transfer, with initial research topics in friction stir welding, arc welding and laser welding of aerospace alloys. TWI's chief executive noted that the institute was TWI's longest-standing Chinese member company — a relationship, in other words, that predated the centre by many years.

Scientific publishing: Aeronautical Manufacturing Technology

The institute publishes Aeronautical Manufacturing Technology, a journal founded in 1958 — one year after the institute itself — which has carried the discipline's Chinese-language research record for more than six decades. A journal of that age, attached to the national institute of its field, is both a scholarly record and a professional institution: generations of Chinese manufacturing engineers have published the processes they developed, and read the processes others developed, in its pages. The institute's publishing role parallels its laboratory role — codifying and spreading manufacturing knowledge across the whole aviation industry, not only within AVIC's own factories.

Digital and intelligent manufacturing

The newest layer of the institute's work is digital. Its organisation list includes the Aviation Science and Technology Key Laboratory of Digital Manufacturing Technology and the Aviation Industry Intelligent Manufacturing Innovation Center, alongside the Beijing Key Laboratory of Complex Component Numerical Control Processing Technology and Equipment. Numerical control machining of complex components — the sculpted, thin-walled parts of aero-engines and airframes that cannot be made by simpler methods — has been a core aeronautical manufacturing problem since the jet age; digital manufacturing generalises that problem, linking design data, process simulation, machine control and inspection into one data chain.

Intelligent manufacturing carries the same integration further, towards factories that sense and adjust their own processes. That the AVIC group-level innovation centre for intelligent manufacturing sits within this institute follows from its history: the institute that researched individual processes — welding, forming, machining — is the natural home for the work of connecting those processes into digitally managed production systems, and its Research and Development Center of Aviation Special Equipment supplies the bespoke machines that such systems require. Its Beijing International Science and Technology Cooperation Base of Aviation Manufacturing Technology and High-end Special Equipment gives this work, like its welding research, an organised international channel.

Why the institute matters

The AVIC Manufacturing Technology Institute matters because manufacturing technology is where aircraft programmes succeed or fail at scale. China's aviation industry can design advanced aircraft, but each design demands processes — for welding titanium, forming composites, machining complex components additively and conventionally, and joining structures that must survive decades of fatigue — that have to be researched, proven and industrialised somewhere. Since 1957 that somewhere, for Chinese aviation, has principally been this institute: from the Ninth Research Institute of the Second Ministry of Machinery Industry, through its long career as BAMTRI, to its present form under AVIC, with its state key laboratory for energy-beam processing, its welding innovation centre, its journal of record and its research centre at TWI in Cambridge. It is the workshop science of Chinese aviation, institutionalised.