Objective
In the bicycle, furniture and automotive industry the interest is centred on the use of aluminium tubes for frames. The advantage of aluminium alloys is the light weight, compared to steel tubes. However, the joining of aluminium is much more difficult than steel. The reason is the high melting, tenacious oxide layer, formed immediately on aluminium, when it is subjected to air. Brazing of aluminium is very difficult and for welding only Gas Tungsten Arc (GTA) and Gas Metal Arc (GMA-welding can be applied in production. GTAW gives the highest quality and is widely used in bicycle and furniture industry, but the process can not be easily mechanised or robotised for the thin walled tubes to be joined. So hand welding is the alternative and due to the low wages in Asia most of the bicycle frames are manufactured there. The PPAW-process has shown on steel welding, where direct current (dc) is used, to be capable of hand, mechanised and robotic welding with a quality surpassing that of GTAW. It is thought, that the same will be true for the welding of aluminium. The PPAW process, however, is so new, that the special problems for aluminium welding, e.g. welding with alternating current (a.c.) current, supply of filler material and coping with potential weld defects like porosity and hot cracking are not at all solved, yet. The aim of the project is to make PPAW suited for a.c-welding and to develop the welding procedures to join sheet, thin walled tubes, formed sheet or small diameter rods of aluminium alloys. The expected achievements for the end users (4 SME's, 1 other) are: 1. improvement of the productivity by at least 25%,2. Iower processing costs by saving of weld metal 50% and a lower energy consumption of 10%, 3 improved product quality (good appearance) and 4. lower post finishing (grinding) by at least 90%. For these five end users, the total benefits amounts to 2.25 MECU per year by the introduction of this new technology in their production lines. This is based on 15% reduction in production costs. The expected achievement for the PPAW machine suppliers and robot suppliers (2 SME's, 1 other proposer) is to supply a.c.-machine for aluminium welding which can be used by other industries such as automotive, household articles and furniture. For the machine/robot suppliers, the total benefits amounts to 74 MECU per year. For the users of this technique in different industries, the ttal savings are estimated as 50 MECU per year. The consortium consist of - Suppliers of welding machines: Plasma Modules and Lappe + Marksmann, - Robot supplier: Cloos, - End users: Flevobike, Steco, Bakker, Handicare and ARC( on behalf of Hydro). - Material suppliers: SAPA and ALPOCO and - the RTD performers: TNO and SINTEF. The listed objectives of the proposed project directly refer to the priority areas: of the Brite/Euram III programme; 1 . 1. 1 .S ( adaptation and application of new technologies), 1.1.3.S (development of new production processes for automation), 2.1.1.S ( manufacturing at reduced costs for increased functionality of existing engineering materials and high added-value products).
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences chemical sciences inorganic chemistry transition metals
- social sciences sociology industrial relations automation
- engineering and technology mechanical engineering vehicle engineering automotive engineering
- natural sciences chemical sciences inorganic chemistry post-transition metals
- social sciences economics and business economics production economics productivity
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Coordinator
00740 Helsinki
Finland
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.