Fourth official COMBILASER press release
In its second year the 12-member COMBILASER research consortium held three consortium meetings. The first consortium meeting was held on 7th and 8th March 2016 at Laser Zentrum Hannover, the second from 7th to 8th June 2016 at RECENDT headquarters in Linz, Austria and the third from 29th November until 1st December 2016 at the University of Sheffield. These three and multiple other intensive meetings were held in order to support the research and development intensive work that had to be coordinated in 2016. After the groundwork that was laid in the first – industrial use-case definition and concept design phase – and currently accomplished activities in the second year – finalization of test designs and first implementation assessment tests – the third year will see intensive validation and project result exploitation activities. One of the main innovations of the COMBILASER project – the self-learning-system developed by University of Sheffield - is almost 100% completed. Similarly, some other features have been finalized and also been agreed-upon on their implementation; different monitoring systems (spectral monitoring, thermography, melt pool monitoring) and NDT solutions (laser ultrasonic systems, laser acoustic detection system, machine vision inspection) have also been developed, tested and chosen for each one of the three UCs. The intensive system integration of all building blocks – SLS, monitoring and NDT – is expected to be completed in the early first half of 2017. The remainder of 2017 will then be focused on validation of the project solution; first in laboratory conditions under supervision of different R&D partners, and finally at industrial partners’ premises. The COMBILASER project has received substantive interest from the photonics community and wider industrial associations in Europe. In 2016 it has been presented at events such as The Future of Road Mobility Forum at EARPA in Brussels, on the 19th World Conference on Non-Destructive Testing in Munich, at the 5th International Symposium on Laser-Ultrasonics and Advanced Sensing in Linz, at the specialized Oil & Gas Conference and the 12th International Conference on Industrial Dimensional Metrology – both in Bilbao, Spain – and many more. Further intensive promotion efforts by all partner are planned for 2017 – on both European and respective national levels – to support the upcoming validation and exploitation phase and ensure that the solutions developed in COMBILASER can be realised to their full potential.
Keywords
laser, welding, self-learning, materials processing, instrumentation, algorythms
Countries
Austria, Germany, Spain, Finland, France, Slovenia, United Kingdom