Flexible Laser-based manufacturing through precision photon distribution

由于新兴材料和数字技术的发展，产品设计空间比以往任何时候都大。尽管如此，欧盟制造商仍在努力创新，传统工具成为主要瓶颈。现有的加工工具是为一个更稳定的世界而设计的，当时一个单一的工艺流程将保持多年不变。为了提高竞争力并应对新的机遇，制造业现在需要可定制的工具，适用于多个流程，并可快速重新配置以应对不断变化的需求。FLASH是一个行业驱动的项目，由全球制造业领导者PRIMA领导，并得到6家大型企业、6家创新型中小企业、2所大学、2家RTO和一个代表全球超过55，000家公司的制造业协会EWF的支持。FLASH将利用基于激光的制造的优势，这种制造更灵活，更适合数字控制，并且比传统的机械/化学/热工艺产生更少的废物。虽然最先进的基于激光的机器针对单一应用进行了优化，但FLASH将开发一个具有三个内置激光源的灵活平台，允许在具有三个不同光束传输头的灵活机器人/CNC单元中，在具有动态光束整形的宽脉冲长度范围内进行多波长发射。其结果将是一个面向未来的系统，能够在所有主要材料类型上进行至少10个宏观和微观生产过程，旨在为一系列行业快速发展的产品提供灵活和可定制的制造。FLASH的优势将在汽车（汽车横梁）、医疗（髋关节植入物）、电动汽车（电动机发夹）和工具（微型钻头、超级磨料砂轮）行业得到工业展示，预计这些行业将显著节省加工时间、成本和能源，同时通过设计修改和材料替代释放产品优势，而使用现有技术是不可能的。

Thanks to emerging materials and digital technologies, the product design space is larger than ever. Despite this, EU manufacturers are struggling to innovate, with traditional tools presenting a major bottleneck. Existing machining tools were designed for a more stable world, when a single process flow would remain unchanged for years. To increase competitiveness and respond to new opportunities, the manufacturing industry now needs customisable tools, applicable to multiple processes, and rapidly reconfigurable in response to changing needs. FLASH is an industry driven project, led by global manufacturing leader PRIMA and supported by 6 large enterprises, 6 innovative SMEs, 2 Universities, 2 RTOs, and a manufacturing association, EWF, that represents >55k companies globally. FLASH will leverage the benefits of laser-based manufacturing, which is more flexible, more amenable to digital control, and generates less waste than traditional mechanical/chemical/thermal processes. Whilst state of the art laser-based machines are optimised for a single application, FLASH will develop a flexible platform with three built-in laser sources, allowing multi-wavelength emission, over a broad pulse length regime with dynamic beam shaping, in a flexible robotic/CNC cell with three different beam delivery heads. The result will be a futureproof system capable of at least 10 macro and micro production processes over all major material types, designed to enable flexible and customisable manufacturing of rapidly evolving products for a range of industries. The benefits of FLASH will be industrially demonstrated in the automotive (car cross beam), medical (hip implant), e-mobility (electric motor hairpins) and tooling (micro drills, super abrasive grinding wheels) industries, where significant process-time, -cost and -energy savings are expected, alongside unlocking product benefits through design modifications and material substitutions not possible using existing technologies.