The COMIC project has reached the end of its second year

The COMIC project (“New Enabling Technologies for Flexible and Automated Manufacturing of Multimaterial Components”) is continuing as planned and has recently reached the end of its second year.

At this point, the main conclusions that can be drawn at the global level from the consortium can be summarized as:

ACT1 – Embryonic data space for multi-material manufacturing value chains.

• The approach and design of the connectivity of the hardware systems of the production processes used in the COMIC project has been carried out.
• Progress has been made in the definition of the architecture in Cloud, as well as in the integration of the data modeled in said platform.
• Work has been done on how to select the appropriate data for storage and subsequent processing. Different ways of ingesting the data have been tested.
• Progress has been made in the definition of middleware systems to ensure interoperability.

ACT2 – New concepts of multi-material components.

• Preliminary designs of the 3 components of the different use cases have been successfully completed including requirements to be met by the selected parts and materials.
• The necessary material and joint characterization tests have been defined for subsequent calculation of the parts with real data.

• Preliminary calculation steps have been performed for each of the parts with theoretical values of materials.

ACT3 – New highly flexible processes for multi-material manufacturing.

• The manufacturing steps for each of the parts of the different use cases have been defined, indicating approximate process conditions.
• Designs or redesigns of manufacturing and assembly equipment for new components have been made to adapt to process or part geometry, as well as the design of a welding head.

• Designs of different laboratory scale sensorized molds have been carried out, as well as part mold.

• Several cutting (foil, FML, SMC, raw prepreg) and welding (foil-plate) tests have been performed.

• Studies of process parameters and characterization of surface treatments, prepreg deposition parameters by AFP and press forming of different thermoplastic materials have been carried out.
• Simulation studies of forming process with theoretical values have been started.

ACT4 – Digital strategies for flexible, zero-defect manufacturing.

• Progress has been made in the investigation of traceability by vision on composite part.
• Requirements for quality control and zero defect strategies have been defined.
• Digital twins have been sketched and a proof of concept of one of them has been implemented at Tecnomatix.
• A connector has been designed to link Plant Simulator with the FIWARE Platform.
• The sensors to be integrated in the different molds have been defined, as well as the signal acquisition and processing systems.
• The different quality control technologies have been defined: UT, geometry inspection by vision and active thermography, starting in some cases to perform inspections at the test piece level.

FAGOR ARRASATE participates in this project together with DGH ROBOTICA, AUTOMATIZACION Y MANTENIMIENTO INDUSTRIAL, S.A., AUTOTECH ENGINEERING, S.L., SOFITEC AERO, S.L., INESPASA, ENDITY and MANAGING COMPOSITES, S.L. In addition, several prestigious technological centers such as IDEKO, ITI, KONIKER, TEKNIKER and AIMEN also participate in the consortium as subcontracted entities.

Purpose of the project

The automotive and aeronautical industries are two of the most relevant within the manufacturing sector in Spain, both contributing 11% of the country’s GDP.

The competitiveness of these two sectors and, in general, of the Spanish manufacturing sector depends, more and more, on their capacity to produce high added value and differentiated products in an efficient and sustainable way, based on contained production costs, guaranteeing their quality and minimizing time to market. All this requires a change in the manufacturing paradigm through the introduction of new intelligent manufacturing technologies to ensure both production efficiency (through flexible and reconfigurable production systems) and the quality of the manufactured product, guaranteeing an efficient manufacturing model, especially in the case of the increasingly frequent and necessary manufacture of short batches, derived from the massive customization of products, whose life cycles are becoming shorter and shorter.

To this end, COMIC’s main objective is the research of new concepts of integral and efficient manufacturing of multi-material components based on the definition of a digital architecture that allows flexible and intelligent manufacturing (through an integral management of the data flow in the design, engineering and manufacturing phases) combined with the development of advanced manufacturing technologies (surface treatment, preforming, joining, forming and post-processing), based on the characteristics of the component to be manufactured.

The project is funded by the CDTI (Project MIG-20221004), a body under the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities of the Government of Spain, within the framework of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan.

More information about the project: Proyecto COMIC