DIGItal MANufacturing Technologies for Zero-defect Industry 4.0 Production

Project Information

DIGIMAN4.0

Grant agreement ID: 814225

DOI

10.3030/814225

Project closed

EC signature date 30 August 2018

Start date 1 January 2019

End date 31 March 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 3 938 028,68

EU contribution

€ 3 938 028,68

Coordinated by

DANMARKS TEKNISKE UNIVERSITET
Denmark

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - DIGIMAN4.0 (DIGItal MANufacturing Technologies for Zero-defect Industry 4.0 Production)

Reporting period: 2021-01-01 to 2024-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

• WHAT IS THE PROBLEM/ISSUE BEING ADDRESSED BY THE DIGIMAN4.0 PROJECT?
A necessary condition for the European productive sector to be at the global forefront of technology, ensuring job creation and sustainable growth, is to have access to innovative, entrepreneurial, highly skilled research cross-disciplinary engineers in the fields of production engineering and digital manufacturing technologies. To date, Industry 4.0 is a trending topic across industries, professions and hierarchical levels inside each company. It is a complex topic, the result of many interrelated elements: technical expertise is required in several different fields. These types of cross-disciplinary profiles are extremely rare, and often not even available. Companies, and in particular SMEs, struggle to embrace the fourth industrial revolution and their uptake of manufacturing digitalization remains a challenge.

• WHY IS THE DIGIMAN4.0 PROJECTIMPORTANT FOR SOCIETY?
Industry 4.0 overall identifies a strategy aimed at enabling industry to a transition towards future ways of production. Industry 4.0 gravitates around one core rationale: recent progress in a variety of digital technologies has created unprecedented possibilities that result in huge improvements in operational effectiveness for manufacturing industries. The magnitude of this paradigm shift justified referring to Industry 4.0 as being the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”. There is a widespread consensus among the different stakeholders in the industry, at research institutions and in academia, that Industry 4.0 consists of essentially 9 clusters of key-enabling digital technologies: Big Data and Analytics; Autonomous Robots; Simulation; Horizontal and Vertical System Integration; Industrial Internet of Things; Cybersecurity; Cloud; Additive Manufacturing; Augmented Reality. Industry 4.0 enables several synergies among different elements of current production and the new digital technologies. Those synergies can be translated into initiatives and levers with potential to result in considerable improvements in manufacturing processes.

Manufacturing is deeply embedded in the economy and the society, particularly in Europe. However, even though the European manufacturing industry is among the worldwide technology leaders, the increasing pressure of market demands and of global competition imply the need of expansion of Europe’s manufacturing technologies and capabilities. The key-enabling technologies that will allow to achieve high quality products and significantly reduce the time to market and costs in order to succeed in this global market place are those digital technologies that companies need to embrace and integrate in their organization in order to execute the necessary transformation from their present state into the Industry 4.0 paradigm.

• WHAT ARE THE OVERALL OBJECTIVES OF THE DIGIMAN4.0 PROJECT?
In reply to these needs, the DIGIMAN4.0 ITN has provided world excellent research training to 15 ESRs in the field of digital manufacturing technologies for Industry 4.0. The DIGIMAN4.0 project objectives are:
(1) To develop, realize and demonstrate innovative technological solutions for high quality, high throughput and high precision production (Zero-Defect) for the manufacturing industry.
(2) To deliver cutting edge multi-disciplinary training in Precision Manufacturing Technologies, Digital Manufacturing Technologies, Integrated Production Metrology, Lean Manufacturing, Production Management.
(3) To validate the developed digital manufacturing technologies by integration into process chains for the manufacturing of advanced components in several sectors (medical and health-care, machine tool, hearing aid and micro acoustics, electronics, automotive, aerospace) in an industrial production environment.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Achievements:
• Full specifications of manufacturing process chains and products value chains defined in accordance to relevant industrial cases.
• Full specifications of digitalization of manufacturing process chains.
• Development of state-of-the-art and beyond state-of-the-art digital manufacturing processes for advanced production for zero-defect manufacturing.
• Development and implementation of product and process digitalization concepts in all ESR projects manufacturing processes chains.
• Development and implementation of the DIGITAL MANUFACTURING READINESS LEVEL framework, applied to all ESR projects.
• Publication of the Open Access DIGIMAN 4.0 Project Handbook
• Organization of 2 DIGIMAN 4.0 Project International Seminars in June 2023 (Technical University of Denmark) and March 2024 (University of Zaragoza) including video recording.
• 71 Open Access scientific journal publication published.

Deliverables between M1 and M63 submitted in due time.

Despite the COVID-19 emergency, all workshops between M1 and M63 have been organized and held.
Alternative settings from in-person workshop to on-line webinar have been realized.
In-person workshops have been recovered and further training events were provided online.

Secondments by all ESRs at their industrial partners were carried out, taking into account the restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 emergency, with reduced presence on-site and remote working.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The DIGIMAN4.0 ESRs have substantially increased the knowledge on digital manufacturing processes development in their respective production technology domains.
The key breakthrough has been the selection, evaluation, development, establishment, and implementation in lab-scale and industrial production settings of product/process digitalization in all DIGIMAN4.0 manufacturing technologies.
This has been achieved on all the domains of the advanced process technologies of DIGIMAN4.0 in which the ESRs have been able through dedicated experiments to achieve a number of digital innovations in all processes.

Summary of progress beyond state of the art includes:
• Digitalization of polymer extrusion, injection molding and robotic assembly by integration of additive manufacturing technologies.
• Improvement of production performance through data analytics in silicon ingot manufacturing and turbine blades re-manufacturing.
• Improvement of production assembly scheduling through machine learning, collaborative robots, selective assembly algorithm, digital twin.
• Improvement of production quality control process by deep learning and augmented reality.
• Manufacturing processes digitalization and vertical integration in Industry 4.0 production using Internet of Things (IoT) solutions.
• Establishment and demonstration of the DIGITAL MANUFACTURING READINESS LEVEL framework, applied to all DIGIMAN 4.0 technologies.

DIGIMAN4.0 ESRs reached the objective of digitizing all their respective manufacturing process chains and products value chains by the end of the project.
The digitalization was validated in industrial settings at the project industrial partners.
The impact for the involved manufacturing processes has a clear reduction of conversion costs by using digital solutions developed in the DIGIMAN4.0 project.

DIGIMAN4.0 Technology Clusters