Résumé des résultats (Abstract)
(Anglais)
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Thanks to emerging materials and digital technologies, the product design space is larger than ever. Despite this, EU
manufacturers are struggling to innovate, with traditional tools presenting a major bottleneck.
Existing machining tools were designed for a more stable world, when a single process flow would remain unchanged
for years. To increase competitiveness and respond to new opportunities, the manufacturing industry now needs
customisable tools, applicable to multiple processes, and rapidly reconfigurable in response to changing needs.
FLASH is an industry driven project, led by global manufacturing leader PRIMA and supported by 6 large enterprises,
6 innovative SMEs, 2 Universities, 2 RTOs, and a manufacturing association, EWF, that represents >55k companies
globally.
FLASH will leverage the benefits of laser-based manufacturing, which is more flexible, more amenable to digital control,
and generates less waste than traditional mechanical/chemical/thermal processes. Whilst state of the art laser-based
machines are optimised for a single application, FLASH will develop a flexible platform with three built-in laser sources,
allowing multi-wavelength emission, over a broad pulse length regime with dynamic beam shaping, in a flexible robotic/
CNC cell with three different beam delivery heads.
The result will be a futureproof system capable of at least 10 macro and micro production processes over all major
material types, designed to enable flexible and customisable manufacturing of rapidly evolving products for a range of
industries.
The benefits of FLASH will be industrially demonstrated in the automotive (car cross beam), medical (hip implant), emobility
(electric motor hairpins) and tooling (micro drills, super abrasive grinding wheels) industries, where significant
process-time, -cost and -energy savings are expected, alongside unlocking product benefits through design modifications
and material substitutions not possible using existing technologies.
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