Public Funding for Prodtex Limited

Laser welding is a high throughput, low distortion, fully automated joining method, already used by aerospace and automotive industries for several decades to fabricate structures from fuselage sections to car bodies. The requirements on the welds in such structures, depending on the application in question, can be very demanding: strength, resistance to fatigue, resistance to corrosion, aesthetics etc. Laser welding takes place at high speed and results in very small welds. This, coupled with the demands placed on the welds, renders even small imperfections unacceptable. Meeting this quality challenge is always difficult. This is becoming more so, as structures needed for safer and more energy-efficient aircraft and mass-electrification of road transport become larger and more intricate. This currently limits the broader uptake of laser welding, which would otherwise be an attractively productive manufacturing technique. This is compounded by the fact that laser welding requires precise setup. Welding can prove intolerant to small gaps between parts, or small positioning errors between the laser beam and those parts. Gaps and errors can result from problems upstream, with inadequate material controls, incorrect part placement, and poor fixturing, as well as distortion-induced part movement during welding. Such problems are further exacerbated in larger structures made out of thin materials. Cost-effective, flexible, and accurate beam manipulation over a large working area is essential, as is a capability for intelligent real-time adjustments in the beam during welding. This requirement is not currently well served by industrial robots, nor alternative manipulators such as scanners or gantries. The e-Tau project will develop, test and validate a novel precision laser welding system, facilitating a step-change in the quality of larger aerospace and automotive welded structures: * By developing cutting-edge high precision parallel kinematic machine (PKM) Tau robot manipulation * That works with advanced laser beam wobbling optics * Integrated with intelligent quality assurance and control sensors * Then demonstrating the application of that system to the fabrication of large wing skin structures for the aerospace sector, and assembly of a range of automotive parts for e-mobility * Along with an accompanying digital twin system, to visualise and quantify production applications with throughput and cost information. With this, e-Tau will unlock, for manufacturing as a whole: * Improved tolerance to part placement and fit-up for laser welding. * Improved - and maintained - weld quality. * Increased productivity and reduction in repairs and scrap. Reduced and potentially eliminated need for expensive and time-consuming post-weld NDT.

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International competitiveness requires the UK to modernise its industrial capabilities, which are steering industries towards widespread development and adoption of automation, and autonomous based solutions. These technologies have the potential to create novel and disruptive manufacturing capabilities leading to significant improvements in quality, accuracy, precision, and cost to manufacture. High integrity welding is a key enabling technology for UK manufacturing and the purpose of WeldZero is to develop and showcase the benefits of adopting intelligent welding robotic system solutions within a cyber-physical production system (CPPS). The WeldZero project will develop and showcase the benefits of digital technologies applied to welding operations in an industrial manufacturing context to support a zero defect strategy. By bringing together state-of-the-art data integration approaches and data handling with real-world manufacturing to work to the achievement of zero defects in a multi-stage production line. This will prove the effectiveness of digital welding and accelerate the wider adoption of the new Industry 4.0 strategies in the existing manufacturing systems -- improving the competitiveness of the UK. The system created will be based around a data rich manufacturing environment whereby both direct machine control and feedback can be collated and processed in real-time. Coupled to this system will be a number of additional technology applications such as weld toolpath planning and simulation, advanced sensor integration and control algorithms, machining learning and data analysis. This will then feedback into specific welding cell control systems to substantially improve manufacturing performance. The project will demonstrate the impact of WeldZero using four different welded product applications from the construction, automotive and off-shore manufacturing sectors; each using different welding process solutions; with the aim of increasing productivity by at least 40%. WeldZero contributes to all key innovation areas under the Manufacturing Made Smarter competition: Smart connected factory: application and use of use of real-time data to optimise operational efficiency capture, analysis and visualisation of manufacturing processes. Connected and versatile supply chain: Full process information integration, communication and traceability are a key aspects of WeldZero. Design, make, test, including: Primarily contributing to virtual product testing, verification and validation, quality monitoring and inspection -- in the context of weld processing and manufacturing sequencing design. Adaptable, flexible manufacturing operations: Enable adoption of advanced welding technologies in a human-centric automation and autonomy, enabling flexible manufacturing systems.