Article submitted by Giacomo Mussino – Advanced & Sustainable Technologies Senior Consultant at Competence Industry Manufacturing 4.0
- Tell us about CIM4.0. What is your core business and role within the project?
Competence Industry Manufacturing 4.0 (CIM4.0) is one of the eight Italian competence centres devoted to transfer new technologies to industrial or services companies: among others, CIM4.0 special knowledge is Digital Factories (DF) and Additive Manufacturing (AM) application, mainly in Aerospace and Automotive fields. In ECOFACT project, the blend of the two areas drove CIM4.0 to support a pre-demo site to deliver and test the ECOFACT platform.
- Why did your organisation get involved in the ECOFACT project? How does this activity fit with the normal business of your organisation?
CIM4.0 got involved in the project because of the attention paid to sustainability aspects of the additive manufacturing technologies: energy consumption and process optimization which are key elements to reduce costs and make AM suitable for a larger range of application. Supporting small or medium enterprises in the evaluation and first application of AM needs also to rely on effective demonstration of sustainability.
- How will the outputs of the ECOFACT project help production system energy performance?
ECOFACT is a key project to understand energy consumption sources and relationship with results quality in the AM production and prepare solution to optimize production in terms of efficiency, energy and material consumption (raw and ancillary ones, like inserting gas): process parameters can be changed and quickly adapted for every process stage.
- What are the technical challenges your work in ECOFACT is trying to overcome?
Complexity of the process and involved parameters understanding is the main challenge: hardware and software adaptation of original equipment and machines to get process information and consumption measure directly from them during the process, analyse and correlate data to predict and control energy absorption thanks to a standard and smart platform.
- What positive impacts will the projects have when complete?
For our application, the additional and deep knowledge about AM process, including capability to smart tune process and increase all sustainability aspects.
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