During the first 18 months of the project, the consortium worked on the definition of specifications of materials, sensors, and systems to be developed and/or used during the project as well as on the initial development of the technologies to digitalize the different stages of the composite component lifecycle: manufacturing, operation and repair.
During the second reporting period, parallel work continued in the three main technological blocks, namely: manufacturing, health and usage monitoring and repair. The main achievements of each block are summarised as follows:
(1) A new 3R resin formulation suitable for prepreg development with aeronautic grade and suitable for ATL manufacturing has been formulated. Additionally, ATL tapes of this material with integrated fiber optic sensors (FOS) and MFC transducers have been developed to enable real-time monitoring of the ATL consolidation process, and SHM applications, respectively. Hybrid and data-driven models for enhanced crystallization and curing kinetics have been calibrated and validated. Also, a method for the monitoring of DoC and DoCr by THz measurements was developed and successful implemented both on 3R-resin tapes as TP tapes.
(2) Both hardware and software for health and usage monitoring have been developed. On the hardware side, sensor nodes' analog circuits (actuation and acquisition) were design, simulated and manufactured to interface with the sensor network. Virtual transducer and virtual damage concepts have been developed to optimize the sensor network configuration in planar delamination. On the software side, an open-source, HPC-capable finite element method-based multiphysics solver for ultrasonic guided wave propagation simulation has been developed and validated. Additionally, a toolbox based on Deep Learning technology has been implemented to predict location and size of delamination damages. Finally, a fracture propagation characterization and modelling has been completed for commercial (A350) material, and it is almost finished for 3R resin laminates.
(3) Four different digital repair technologies have been developed. I) The software interface and scarf generation of the Visual Assisted Scarfing System has been finalized and validated. It is ready for data transfer to the digital twin. II) A Portable LIBS system with laser cleaning has been designed, assembled and validated. III) A blanket design optimization tool has been integrated and completed together. The algorithm for repair heating process control has been developed and is ready to be embedded within the DT framework. IV) A new crack stopping material has been successfully validated as well as a new sensor for crack detection in bondlines.
Transversal to all these activities, a scalable and adaptable Digital Twin framework has been implemented with the following functionalities: Digital Twin per OPC Server, Local Cloud-Edge communication, standard OPC-UA models, hardware mapping integration, real-time synchronization, enhanced digital twin flexibility, cloud architecture deployment, error management & notifications, template services & model creation, custom model relationships, deletion workflows, edge component deployment, localized data processing. Additionally, seamless integration with manufacturing processes has been stablished.
LCA and LCC is under development from the beginning of the project with the collaboration of all partners to prepare the overall evaluation by the end of the project.
Finally, an Advisory Board has been established with immediate interactions between GENEX innovations and MRO industrial requirements.
