CloudiFacturing mapped on Significant innovations and lessons learned, training aspects

The realized progress advances the state of the art in several aspects:                                               

• Electric machine design process including electromagnetic finite element computation, winding design, and post-processing are available on a pay-per-use basis as a cloud solution. To the knowledge of the experiment partners, such a solution has never before been presented.
• Seamless, automated creation of production data avoids data handover errors and provides fast transition from simulation and design to manufacturing of motor prototypes. The full parametric manner of realization also provides a feature never available before.
• The capability to bring a customer requirement in the form of a motor specification to a fully functional motor prototype within one week is a revolutionary USP for Hanning. Despite the fact that this capability still needs to be demonstrated in real life, the steps taken into this direction have greatly improved Hanning’s process know-how and agility.

CETMA was able to exploit the possibilities that customized simulation offers to SME’s specialized in boat hulls manufacturing. Thanks to cloud resources, enough power computing is available to analyze different scenarios in a few days instead of several weeks.
Designers of CATMARINE and SKA are now able to achieve high-quality products by analyzing different manufacturing scenarios without wasting time, money and material. The platform is able to optimize the resin injections points/vents and verify the presence of defects in the final product, thus ensuring a complete and correct mold-filling.

https://www.cloudifacturing.eu/experiment2outcome/

Tools developed and deployed on CloudiFacturing platform during this experiment allow end-users who operate water quenches to derive operational conditions of the water quench and thus, increase precision and repeatability of the process and decrease its dependence on the experience of the operator. The outcomes of the experiment also bring new knowledge to the whole process. Additionally, the developed technologies allow using numerical modeling and simulation in the design of a new generation of water quenches and their components.

The establishment of the cloud cluster solution for running SyMSpace has greatly improved the engineering capacity of LCM which no longer includes the bottleneck of local computation resources. Being able to reserve as many cloud computing resources as necessary at any given time takes away the need to invest into hardware and maintenance just for covering peak loads. This means a great improvement of customer satisfaction.

Additionally, already five industrial partners are testing SyMSpace on a pay-per-use basis in the cloud. The main USPs are the low barrier for access (no upfront costs, no long-time installation, etc.) and the low total costs.

A certain interest has also been coming from academic players. As SyMSpace will see an open source release in the near future, this seems to be an interesting opportunity to run and eventually publish or contribute own algorithms from the academic research around electric machines. With the help of the cloud solution, the access barrier for remote partners has completely fallen away: beginning of September 2018, the solution was presented to a partner at the WEMPEC consortium at University of Madison, Wisconsin who is considering applying the SyMSpace cloud solution for research in magnetic bearings.

This example shows how the international contact, also across research areas has been facilitated using the cloud cluster solution of SyMSpace. This is an important driver for the innovation potential at LCM which, as a trans-academic-industrial player heavily relies on close contacts with other research institutions.

The demonstration of the faster and more reliable prototyping production process is expected to be a major improvement both internally and externally at Hanning. However, due to the delays and difficulties experienced in the implementation of the winding process, this step still needs to be realized. The potential, however, is impressive as demonstrated in the KPI metrics below.

Table 12: experiment 1 impact summary

A recent study addressed that VARTM is among the fastest growing technology in the composite industry.
The cloud-based solution will reduce the cost of entering VARTM technology by 40% to 60%. This will lead to wider adoption of the technology with significant advantages in terms of quality, repeatability, and reduction of environmental and safety impact for many SMEs around the EU.
In addition to this, affordable simulations will lead to fast prototyping, experimentation, and bolder design.

From a business point of view, this project allowed CATMARINE to reduce its Time To Market (TTM), reduce its process design cost and material waste. Looking in perspective, this technology will allow the shipyard to offer its customer innovative solutions, especially in the building of complex geometry and expansive material as carbon fiber and epoxy resin.

For SKA, VARTM simulation will be a new service to add to its catalog as for FEM analysis.

"In our field, it is no simple task to find a partner who is not only a top expert in a given field but also able to take initiative in finding innovative solutions. It is only in more challenging situations
when cooperation with real professionals is genuinely appreciated. CloudiFacturing project has certainly been the right choice", Ondřej Tůma, Managing Director, FERRAM STROJÍRNA s.r.o.

The experiment setup was well prepared and discussed by the experiment partners LCM and Hanning. The implementation of the solution in the CloudiFacturing Marketplace, however, was unclear and needed significant efforts during the early stages of the experiment. This partly concerned the technical solution and partly was felt in the definition and in conveying the experiment structure to the consortium.

While this has added some unplanned efforts to the experiment which then reduced the time available for the practical implementations, the cause seems quite unavoidable for wave 1 of the experiments since the development of the Marketplace happened in parallel to the experiments. This situation will, therefore, automatically improve for the experiments in wave 2.

The combined use of a simulation solution based on a numerical model and of remote HPC resources has allowed the development of a new design and development process of catamaran hulls.

The solution, which relies on Cloudifacturing platform, gives two kinds of advantages. Technically, more efficient and less defect-prone processes can be conceived and analyzed before their adoption. From an economic point of view, SME can afford the use of HPC resources without heavy investments.

"Thanks to the CloudiFacturing technology we can now take a look inside the VARTM process and switch our manufacturing process to a more safe, reliable and cheaper one", Gabriele Totisco, Catmarine CEO.