DigiAutoFab

Vision

The DigiAutoFab project aims to digitalize the entire process chain for additively manufactured plastic components using the powder bed fusion process with lasers (PBF-LB/P), from design and production preparation to production and downstream processes.

Objective:

The aim of digitalization is to achieve end-to-end traceability of components and the targeted development of process knowledge in order to quickly optimise processing parameters using machine learning approaches and improve reproducibility and transferability between systems. This will enable the use of additive manufacturing processes in automotive engineering for the production of pre-series and spare parts.

By creating a digital twin, efficient design workflows can be developed and machine learning methods can be used to enable the additive manufacturing of functional components in the application scenarios with a robust and efficient overall process. These new capabilities then allow the use of materials that are currently difficult to process but are economically more attractive and the processing of recycled material, thus contributing to the cost reduction and sustainability of additive manufacturing.

The individual components, methods, interfaces and algorithms are developed along two use cases, which are also used in a technology demonstration at the end of the project and serve to derive business models with which the described application scenarios can be served.

The use cases are as follows:

• Injection-molded equivalent pre-series parts
• Injection-molded equivalent spare parts

DigiAutoFab's final exploitation strategy is based on four interlinked activities:

• Development of the most important exploitable results (Key Exploitable Results, KER)
• Elaboration and refinement of exploitation paths, including the development of strategies to protect intellectual property rights and knowledge, as well as ongoing analysis of the market landscape
• Bridging project end results with potential commercial applications and roadmapping for long-term impact after project completion
• In parallel, the possibility of cooperative business models: The digitalization solutions developed in the project are continuously checked to see whether business models can be made possible across company boundaries

Project structure:

The project concept comprises eight work packages as follows: