Modular laser sources for sustainable production of short personalized production series (WAVETAILOR)

Project team

Danijela Rostohar (PI)

Amirhossein Sadeghian (Research Fellow)

Funder:

European Commission / IUK Horizon Europe Guarantee

Value

£770,699.23

Collaborators:

Lead: Joanneum Research Forschungsgesellschaft Mbh

Other collaborators:

Lortek S Coop
Prima Additive Srl
Nlight Europe Srl
Z Prime Gmbh
Destinus Spain Sl
Aerotecnic Metallic Sl
Morphica Societa A Responsabilita Limitata
Osterreichische Energieagentur Austrian Energy Agency
Tematys

Duration

01/01/2024 - 30/06/2027

Project Overview

WAVETAILOR focuses on two industrial scenarios related to the complex multi-material component and assembly. The first one is the Directed Energy Deposition of a multimaterial leading edge for a hypersonic hydrogen-driven airplane, while the second relates to the Powder Bed Fusion of complex multi-material assembly of a drone for urban delivery. The challenges in both cases are related to zero-defect manufacturing, sustainability, and first-time right manufacturing. WAVETAILOR aims to solve the high-precision in complex material structure manufacturing, the disassembly, reuse, and recycling of components while reducing the environmental footprint of both the manufacturing process and the components themselves.

To achieve this, three main pillars are developed in the project: 1) flexible energy-efficient photonic setup based on modular diode-based laser source and multi-wavelength optics; 2) full reconfigurability of this setup, to use minimal energy and material resources in the manufacturing of two use cases and 3) ZDM and ZDW strategies at assembly level controlling the compliability of complex multimaterial products at the machine level, shop floor level, and delocalized manufacturing chain level. The latter pillar will be based on digital sibling (shop floor level) and twin (cloud level) for automatic assessment of component/assembly design for circularity; first-time right process planning using synthetic legacy data and ZDM/ZDW based on real-time process and post-process monitoring.

When the WAVETAILOR objectives are achieved, the manufacturing process of the two use cases will have spent 200MWh of energy less, 923kg of waste less, while the production costs are going to be 50-65% lower. In order to prove this, a dedicated sustainability study is provided along the project.

Project Objectives

Objective 1: Development of modular, multi-WL laser source, multi-beam scanners and processing heads
Objective 2: Development and implementation of PBF-LB system around new laser source
Objective 3: Development of a multi-wavelength modular and reconfigurable DED-LB station
Objective 4: Digital Twin for LBAM
Objective 5: Development of effective, efficient data acquisition, and ML/AI-driven control feedback loop
Objective 6: Processing of product demonstrators with multi-wavelength approach supported by Digital Twin
Objective 7: Validation of lower consumption of resources, energy and gender dimensions
Objective 8: Towards standardisation and training developments

Impact Statement

WAVETAILOR aims at the Scope #1: Advancement and demonstration of significant improvements in smart production technologies to manufacture complex products such as additive manufacturing, multi-process manufacturing, injection manufacturing, functional printing, intelligent and autonomous handling, shaping, joining, coating, and assembly technologies.

Outcome 1: High-precision manufacturing and manufacturing of products with complex geometries and structures
Outcome 2: Significant reductions in the use of materials, waste, defects and energy consumption, which also lead indirectly to reductions in GHG emissions.
Outcome 3: Highly resilient and flexible production lines, enabling highly customised products across a wide range of markets, and ensuring open strategic autonomy for the manufacturing industry of the EU/AC.
Outcome 4: Fostering the competitiveness of the European manufacturing industry, in general, and (only in the relevant projects) in the field of laser machine tools and within the laser markets in particular