Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Manufacturing industry is at the dawn of a new industrial revolution. During the past two centuries, humanity passed through three industrial revolutions leading to the ability to mass produce complex products in affordable ways. However a new challenge emerged. Products have shorter life times and customers ask for individualized products. The need for small series, even batch-size 1, production appeared. Traditional manufacturing processes can hardly full-fill these needs. New manufacturing processes need to be developed which are of a new kind. Such processes must minimize manufacturing overhead appearing when the design of the product changes (e.g. avoid specific tooling), address complexity of parts and minimize number of steps leading to the final product. Additive manufacturing (AM) seems the ideal solution. However, besides having its own challenges, it would be very surprising that manufacturing industry will rely on a single technology. New processes are needed that work together with AM or independently. The novelty of the proposed program is in exploring electrochemical manufacturing processes for their suitability of mass personalisation. The long term objective is to develop suitable novel manufacturing technologies able to address the challenges of small series production. In the short term electrochemical processes will be explored due to their high potential to be suitable manufacturing technologies for low batch size production. In particular: Tooling: Demonstrate and explore the capability to develop electrochemical manufacturing processes with ultra-low tooling costs. In this part of the program a thermo-electrochemical process, Spark Assisted Chemical Engraving (SACE) suited for glass high precision machining is used as model process. It will be explored how, regardless of design change of the-to-be produced part, very low tooling costs can be achieved. Costly optimisation procedure will be addressed too. Complexity: Develop electrochemical processes able to post-process complex metal parts produced by additive manufacturing. AM can produced very complex metal parts. However extensive post-processing is required to achieve the required surface finish. Pulse electropolishing will be developed towards this aim. The challenges that will be addressed are the development of models able to predict the achieved geometry of the part after polishing and to adapt electroploshing to the high initial surface roughness of metal AM parts (up to hundred and more micrometers). Reduction of process steps: In this last part of the program a novel hybrid process combining SACE and electrochemical machining will be developed in order to be able to machine metal/glass sandwich materials. Such materials are more and more used in modern optical printed circuit boards or advanced devices such as smart phones.