Minimizing exposure of humans to potential carcinogenic dust and increasing competitiveness with robots in composite parts machining.

Manufacturing is one of the strongest motors of the European economy.

The recent Covid-19 crisis has remarked even more the importance of maintaining manufacturing in Europe and the risks of offshoring the production and at the same time this is a unique opportunity to reshape the economy and change the way Europe manufactures products.Before the coronavirus crisis there was a clear trend to replace metal parts by composite parts to reduce the weight of the components and increase the performance of products.

The global composites market size was expected to grow from USD 74 billion in 2020 to USD 112.8 billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 8.8%, but unfortunately the EU market share was not growing as rapidly.Moreover, EU composite manufacturing industry was extremely concerned with the dust generated during composite machining due to the potential cancer risk related to the breathing of fibres and resin, and severe health issues on skin, eyes, lungs and liver.The strategy set on the Recovery Plan for Europe by the European Commission provides an optimistic future for composite manufacturing in Europe, since it is aligned with the strategy of reinforcing the stronger industrial capability and the EU Green Deal for cleaner transport and logistics (composites for lightweight cars and planes) and rolling out renewable energy projects (composites for wind mill blades).FIBREMACH project answers the needs of European composite part manufacturers for cleaner processes and to increase the competitiveness of the EU industry by proposing a robotic system that will disrupt current state of the art of composite machining including an internal dust suction system for improved health and safety conditions by minimizing the exposure of humans to dust with fibres and resins, reduced energy consumption, increased performance and continuous process monitoring and control for “control for “right the first time” machining, while being 68% cheaper than milling machines.