MICROSHOE project in sprint to market
An EU-funded project that has developed a new process to reduce raw material losses in the industrial manufacture of shoes is hoping to bring a finished system to market later this year. A high proportion of the eye-catching outsoles seen in modern sports and casual shoes are made using polyurethane (PU), which is injected into special moulds. However, precisely combining the raw materials needed to make polyurethane on the production line can be hard to achieve with any precision, and as most PUs cannot be remelted or reshaped, this can lead to raw materials loses of up to 20 per cent. In a European industry that generates some 18 billion euro in turnover each year, and which is subject to fierce international competition from low-cost producers in other parts of the world, such loses are significant. As a result, the MICROSHOE project was set up in 2002 under the Growth priority of the EU's Fifth Framework Programme (FP5) in order to develop a system to reduce raw material loses in shoe production. The critical stages in PU production where loses most frequently occur are in the mixing of raw materials and the moulding process to form the outsole, due to the extreme sensitivity of the raw materials to humidity, temperature and other variables. The challenge facing the MICROSHOE partners - ten research and manufacturing organisations from Spain, Italy and Greece - was to develop a system for monitoring the raw materials as they are mixed and moulded in order to ensure the quality of the final outsole. The partners opted for a system based on non-invasive microwave technology to enable them to precisely monitor the PU's physical and chemical properties during production. However, as Enrique Montiel, one of the project partners and assistant director of Spain's Technological Institute for Footwear and Related Industries, told the Commission's DG Research website, this was no easy task. 'PU is so sensitive, so reactive, that your range of error on the production line is extremely small,' he said. The team selected microwave sensors as they are cheap, accurate and small enough to fit inside the walls of the moulds and monitor the density of the liquid PU without actually touching the liquid itself. 'Density is one of the key parameters you have to closely follow,' explains Mr Montiel. 'Defects can form very easily and quickly, which explains why the manufacturer often doesn't realise there's a problem until the moulds have hardened and then it's too late, which means the whole batch has to be thrown out. Continuous process monitoring is essential.' The prototype system developed by the MICROSHOE consortium is made up of a computer, the microwave sensors, a database, and customised software that analyses the data produced by the sensors. The configuration of the system must be adapted to the particular production site where it will be used, but the team has already refined the software element to make it more user friendly on the factor floor. 'We had mountains of data generated by the sensors each time we put the prototype to work. This was fine for testing purposes, but too complex for the daily needs of a factory production supervisor; they don't need such finely tuned information. So, we're changing the way the data is filtered to [produce] a monitoring and analysis function that is easier to use,' explains Mr Montiel. With the project having formally finished in November 2004 the participants have since been preparing for commercialisation of the product, and for the time being at least, the market for their technology is wide open. 'As far as we know, we have no competitors: no one else has developed such a system,' says Mr Montiel. 'We think this technology could be sold around the world, and not only to shoe manufacturers: there are lots of industries that use PU,' he continued, pointing to the producers of sofas, chairs, carpets and even gaskets. With two of the project's Spanish partners leading the commercialisation effort, the first challenge is to guide the technology through Spain's patent application process. Once this is done, they hope to place the system on the market as early as mid-2006.
Countries
Greece, Spain, Italy