Manufacturing is one of the strongest motors of the European economy. Around 1 out of 10 of all enterprises in the EU-27's non-financial business economy belong to the manufacturing industry, employing 28.5 million people in almost 2 million enterprises and generating 1820 billion € of value. Since 2014 the European Commission is actively stimulating the introduction of new technologies leading to flexible manufacturing, clean processes and improved production to increase the competitiveness of the EU manufacturing industry. There is a clear trend in the manufacturing industry to replace metal parts by composite parts in order to reduce the weight of the components and increase the performance of products in sectors as diverse as transportation, energy generation, and construction.
European manufacturing companies need to increase their production flexibility since in an everyday basis new composite parts are being designed for products as diverse as aircrafts, automobiles and consumer goods. Currently used milling-machines are not suited for that flexibility. Current robotic solutions don’t meet the accuracy requirements of composite parts in sectors such as aerospace, wind power and automotive that are gaining momentum in the EU Green Deal for transport optimization, electrification and clean energy generation. EU composite manufacturing industry is 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. In an industry survey on carbon fibre machining 81% of respondents agreed that there is “very high” or “high” need for new actions in order to extract dust from the working area.
FIBREMACH will replace milling machines and manual cutting of composites with a safe, accurate and low-cost robot. The FIBREMACH project answers to the needs of EU composite parts manufacturers and EC trends in key enabling technologies for advanced manufacturing, in order to achieve cleaner processes and increase the competitiveness of EU industry. Thus, a robotic system with an internal dust suction system (suction of more than 98%) has been created to improve health and safety conditions, minimizing the exposure of people to dust containing fibres and resins and making the use of protective equipment unnecessary, with lower energy consumption (22% less), higher performance (3 times more accurate than current robotic systems) and continuous process monitoring and control for "right first time" machining, while being 68% cheaper than milling machines. The project introduces to the market a new technology for the internal suction of dust generated during machining through hollow cutting tools and spindle, minimizing the exposure of people to fibres and resins, providing greater suction capacity and automatic tool change capability, increasing productivity. A scalable industrial robotic architecture is used to provide flexibility to EU composite part manufacturers, better adapting the machining system to their changing production needs, requiring much less investment than traditional machine tools and therefore making companies that currently mill, trim and drill composites manually or by milling machines, such as AERNNOVA, adopt a robotic solution for greater worker protection and higher productivity. The FIBREMACH approach (based on ALDAKIN's expertise in increasing robot precision) has been made possible thanks to PERON's spindle (with the innovative 98% dust extraction system) and FACET's customised tooling (specific design that directs the machined dust into the tool and spindle).
