Challenge

Manufactured metal products ranging from nuts, bolts, cutlery to boilers, valves and engines are used daily by most of the people on the planet, and the global metal products market is expected to grow from 2.1T USD in 2020 to 3.1T USD by 2025. The manufacturing process is energy-intensive and requires substantial amounts of natural and financial resources. Moreover, defective components and engines cannot be easily reworked or recycled without significant effort. Manufactured goods are a significant part of EU’s economy representing 83% (1.6T EUR) of all exports in 2020. More importantly European current way of life requires a competitive manufacturing sector to compensate trade deficits generated by other sectors e.g., energy and services. In past, EU had a healthy trade surplus, which started shrinking in 2015 and became a deficit of 22B EUR in 2018. This is not a healthy situation in the long-run and shows the need for a globally competitive manufacturing industry.

ENGINE Solution

The overall goal of ENGINE is to reduce the environmental impact and improve competitiveness of metal product manufacturers by developing a novel metal product design and manufacturing system, which integrates Life Cycle Assessments in design and business decisions, reduces defects, waste, and shrinks product time-to-market.

ENGINE system combines three integrated modules as per below image – ENGINE exchange, ENGINE toolbox, ENGINE production – which facilitate, industrial data-management, computational product and process design, and in-situ diagnostics, production monitoring and control.

ENGINE System

The metal product design and manufacturing system that integrates the separete modules to enable sustainable-by-design product development and first-time-right and zero-defect manufacturing.

ENGINE
exchange

Data management solution for industrial data storage, sharing and seamless, multiple-location integration of software and hardware tools.

ENGINE
toolbox

Software suite for sustainable-bydesign product development and first-time-right manufacturing.

ENGINE
production

Production control, diagnostics, and monitoring solution enabling zero-defect manufacturing.

ENGINE Objectives

The overall goal of ENGINE is to reduce the environmental impact and improve competitiveness of metal product manufacturers by developing a novel metal product design and manufacturing system, which integrates life-cycle analysis in design and business decisions, reduces defects, waste, and shrinks product time-to-market.

Technical objectives

Deploy, integrate, and demonstrate the first-time-right and zero defect product design and manufacturing system with respective methodologies

Implement a supply-chain, multi-site data management solution for secure gathering, storage and sharing of proprietary industrial data

Create a computational modelling toolbox for first-time-right manufacturing and demonstrate relevant methodologies and workflows

Develop a real-time non-destructive production monitoring solution, AI damage recognition, and demonstrate new methodologies

Business objectives

Increase productivity of industrial partners by deploying the first-time-right and zero-defect metal product design and manufacturing system

Improve competitiveness of consortium partners by enhancing their products and services with innovations from ENGINE

Environmental objectives

Reduce the environmental impact of metal product manufacturers through improved manufacturing processes, and novel repair and refurbishment strategies

Refine and integrate LCA and LCC methods into the design process to support the shift towards sustainable-by-design and circular products

Standardisation objectives

Ensure that innovations in ENGINE follow existing standards and developed specifications, identify gaps in existing standardization, and pave a way towards full standardization

Skills objective

Develop training and upskilling materials for employees working in product design and manufacturing