High-precision OR complex product manufacturing – potentially including the use of photonics (Made in Europe and Photonics Partnerships) (IA)

Products are increasingly complex, e.g. in terms of geometries, structures, embedded and structural electronics, optics or photonics, micro-, nano- or bio-mimetic features or advanced and composite materials. Further constraints arise from new requirements of sustainability in production processes (resource and energy efficiency). In particular components and products have to be manufactured anticipating the fact that they would be disassembled, re-used re-manufactured or recycled.

To maintain technological autonomy and to enable the viable and sustainable manufacturing of high-tech products, innovative advanced manufacturing processes should be developed. Digital models make development, production, and operation of complex products manageable.

Proposals should address the following:

• 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;

OR

• Advancement in high-precision manufacturing technologies, including for example mechanical machining, super-polishing, surface texturing, thin film coating, etching and electrochemical machining, handling and assembly processes, to achieve new product functionalities.

OR

• highly customised laser-based production including new and advanced methods, for example schemes of adapting laser beams and processes to provide a highly precise distribution of photons at the right place and at the right time.

Proposals should indicate which approach they are targeting.

Proposals may also propose to combine more than one of the above approaches when justified for specific high-tech product. For these cases, proposals should still indicate which of the approaches is the primary/main one.

Proposals are also allowed to combine two of the approaches above, provided there is added value in such a combined approach. Arbitrary combinations without integration are excluded.

In all cases, process development will be required to demonstrate and validate the benefits the technologies in flexible and individualised manufacturing processes, minimising waste, defects, energy consumption and emissions; and enabling sustainable, innovative and improved products. The quality of the new products should be validated according to the most advanced metrology capacities, and life cycle assessment should be considered.

The focus can be, for example, on addressing demands in healthcare, automotive, maritime and aviation industries, energy generation or environmental areas.

Proposals could additionally consider one or more of the following, only provided this brings added value:

• Use of novel sustainable and smart materials to achieve same or higher technical features in products while reducing environmental impact and waste;
• Parallel product and manufacturing engineering, developing cyber physical systems, e.g. digital twins, to manage complex production using data spaces across the whole value chain;
• Flexible and collaborative robots and multi-axis machines, to improve their accuracy to high-precision manufacturing;
• Multiscale physics-based models and machine learning/AI methodologies to improve prediction capacity/optimisation in manufacturing, remanufacturing and reuse;
• Management of data;
• Suitable, robust and traceable in-process process and dimension control

Links may be established with relevant cases emerging from the CSA project HORIZON-CL4-2023-RESILIENCE-01-39.

Proposals submitted under this topic should include a business case and exploitation strategy, as outlined in the introduction to this Destination.

Research must build on existing standards or contribute to standardisation. Where relevant, interoperability for data sharing should be addressed.

Interoperability for data sharing should be addressed, focusing on open and trustful federated concepts and standards, enabling effective cross-domain data communities, new data-driven markets, and the Digital Product Passport initiative.

Additionally, a strategy for skills development should be presented, associating social partners where relevant.

All projects should build on or seek collaboration with existing projects and develop synergies with other relevant European, national or regional initiatives, funding programmes and platforms.

This topic implements the co-programmed European Partnerships Made in Europe and Photonics.