Flexible Laser-based manufacturing through precision photon distribution

得益于新兴的材料和数字技术，产品设计空间比以往任何时候都要大。尽管如此，欧盟制造商仍在努力创新，传统工具构成了一个主要瓶颈。现有的加工工具是为一个更稳定的世界而设计的，当时单一的工艺流程将保持多年不变。为了提高竞争力和应对新的机遇，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响应不断变化的需求。Flash是一个行业驱动型项目，由全球制造业领军企业Prima牵头，得到6家大型企业、6家创新型中小企业、2所大学、2家RTO和代表全球5.5万家公司的制造业协会EWF的支持。闪光灯将利用激光制造的好处，这比传统的机械/化学/热工艺更灵活，更容易接受数字控制，产生的废物更少。虽然最先进的基于激光的机器针对单一应用进行了优化，但闪光灯将开发一个具有三个内置激光光源的灵活平台，允许在具有三个不同光束传送头的灵活机器人/数控单元中，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至少支持10个宏观和微观生产过程，旨在为一系列行业实现快速发展的产品的灵活和定制制造。闪存的好处将在汽车(汽车横梁)、医疗(髋关节植入物)、电子移动(电机发夹)和工具(微型钻头、超级磨料砂轮)行业中得到工业展示，这些行业预计将显著节省工艺时间、成本和能源，同时通过设计修改和材料替代实现使用现有技术无法实现的产品优势。

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.