Modular laser sources for sustainable production of short personalized production series

WAVETAILOR focuses two industrial scenarios which are related to the complex multi-material component and assembly.

The first one is Directed Energy Deposition of a multimaterial leading edge for a hypersonic hydrogen-driven airplane, while the second relates to the Powder Bed Fusion of complex multi-material assembly of a drone for urban delivery.

The challenges in both cases are related with zero-defect manufacturing, sustainability and first-time-right manufacturing.

WAVETAILOR aims to solve the high-precision in complex material structure manufacturing, the disassembly, reuse and recycling of components, while reducing the environmental footprint of both manufacturing process and the components itself.

To achieve this, three main pillars are developed in the project: 1) flexible energy efficient photonic setup based on modular diode-based laser source and multi-wavelength optics; 2) full reconfigurability of this setup, to use minimal energy and material resources in manufacturing of two use cases and 3) ZDM and ZDW strategies at assembly level controlling the compliability of complex multimaterial products at machine level, shop floor level and delocalized manufacturing chain level.

The latter pillar will be based on digital sibling (shop floor level) and twin (cloud level) for automatic assessment of component/assembly design for circularity; first-time right process planning using synthetic legacy data and ZDM/ZDW based on real time process and post-process monitoring.When the WAVETAILOR objectives are achieved, the manufacturing process of the two use cases will have spent 200MWh of energy less, 923kg of waste less, while the production costs are going to be 50-65% lower.

In order to prove this a dedicated sustainability study is provided along the project.