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The world’s first Terahertz application for Inspection-As-A-Service: Ensure quality and reduce waste in industrial production through inline inspection

Project description

A more advanced approach to defect detection

From intelligent robots and sensors to 3D printing, the automotive, aerospace, robotics, medical and technical textiles industries are undergoing a digital transformation. Changes are fast, but inspection procedures have not kept pace. Outdated manual inspection methods are still in use. Finding defects and contaminants, for instance, involves cost-inefficient X-ray screening after production is finished. This means that manufacturers waste a lot of raw materials, effort and energy. The EU-funded TULIPZ project is developing technology to enable the real-time, distributed and non-destructive inspection of production lines. The novel approach involves an Internet of Things plug and play solution that combines a patented terahertz technology with deep-learning algorithms offered as a software-as-a-service platform, ensuring better quality, increased throughput and minimal waste.

Objective

Surprisingly, many high-added value and high-quality performance-driven industries such as automotive, aerospace, robotics, medical, and technical textiles rely on old-fashioned and manual inspection methods. Defects and contaminants are often detected only after production (end-of-line quality control) using cumbersome, slow and expensive X-Ray machines. This problem has a major impact on manufacturers and consumers as raw materials, production efforts and energy are irreversibly wasted due to this late and partial inspection. Moreover, due to the emergence and increasing prominence of high-performance composites cut across all fields – wind power (e.g. wind turbine blades), aerospace, automotive - effective and reliable production control and inspection techniques still remain incipient – most of the inspection techniques are still done in a visual and manual way (“market creation” opportunity).
Tulipz is a disruptive IoT plug & play solution for inline production and quality control, which combines a patented Terahertz (THz) technology with proprietary deep-learning algorithms deployed as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform. It allows for total real-time, distributed, non-destructive inspection (NDI) along production lines instead of the currently used end-of-line approach, thus guaranteeing quality, increased throughput and minimal waste. The estimated benefits to customers are substantial: a 5x increase in productivity, equipment uptime of 99.99% and a reduction in production waste by 5%.
TiHive is a team of energetic, enthusiastic and disruptive entrepreneurs, industrialists and researchers who founded the company after ten years of advanced R&D. Our ambition is to become world leader in distributed inspection for high quality, performance engineered products, in particular technical textiles by 2025. This will reinforce the world leadership of Europe in technical textiles.

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Call for proposal

H2020-EIC-SMEInst-2018-2020

See other projects for this call

Sub call

H2020-EIC-SMEInst-2018-2020-3

Funding Scheme

SME - SME instrument

Coordinator

TIHIVE
Net EU contribution
€ 2 360 750,00
Address
12 RUE AMPERE
38000 Grenoble
France

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SME

The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.

Yes
Region
Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Rhône-Alpes Isère
Activity type
Private for-profit entities (excluding Higher or Secondary Education Establishments)
Links
Total cost
€ 3 372 500,00