Third official COMBILASER project press release

On 7th and 8st March 2016 Laser Zentrum Hannover hosted the third consortium meeting of the European COMBILASER consortium. The 12-member COMBILASER research consortium has just ended its first year of the COMBILASER project. The 3-year project that aims to bring beyond state-of-the art solutions in laser welding and laser cladding to the European industry is now entering from its first definition and concept design phase into its industrial case adaptation phase.

The first year period demanded especially close collaboration between R&D institutions and industrial partners in order to lay sound foundations for activities that are to be performed in the future, and the consortium believes the COMBILASER project to have succeeded in this regard thus far.

Meeting hosted at the Laser Zentrum Hannover consisted of reviewing the completed work and preparing the consortium for the project’s first project review, which is to be performed by European Commission on 13th April in Brussels.

The purpose of the consortium meeting in Hannover was to carefully assess the progress made in the first year in activities covering the design of solutions that will later be implemented at COMBILASER’s industrial partners’ premises. Project partners agreed that the progress made was indeed significant. Partner test setup was designed and implemented (by LZH and Laserline), laser illumination setups were designed and completed (by Cavitar and 4D) as well design of melt pool monitoring systems, spectral (by RECENDT and LORTEK) and thermographic monitoring techniques (by LORTEK and Mondragon Assembly), and software programming part of the self-learning system (by University of Sheffield) were done as well.

Intensive tests were done on samples provided by industrial partners (HIDRIA AET – pressure sensor glow plug; Orkli – flame heater sensors; TMC – gas valves). Partners further discussed the implemented promotion steps of the project on the European level that has been quite extensive, with promotions on events such as Schweisstec 2015 in Stuttgart, MESIC 2015 in Barcelona, Laser World of Photonics 2015 in Munich, International Symposium on Laser Ultrasonics and Advanced Sensing 2015 in Linz and AM Platform Meeting in Turin. Further considerations were made on creating synergies with similar Horizon 2020 projects and some were already identified. Partners also planned a presentation of the COMBILASER project at a Photonics Research Event on 5th April in Brussels where projects from field of photonics in the FP7 and H2020 research programs will be represented.

Keywords

Laser-based manufacturing and materials processing, Instrumentation, measurement

Countries

Austria, Germany, Spain, Finland, France, Slovenia, United Kingdom