The complexity of today’s manufacturing processes is ever increasing. More complicated parts, often fabricated in advanced materials, have to be manufactured first time right. In order to reach these objectives, digital manufacturing tools and computer models of machining processes, known as digital twins, can give a better understanding of these processes allowing optimization and consequently a productivity increase

Status report: What’s the technology capable of? Why consider Additive Manufacturing for your company? What’s a viable business case? And how do you start using AM? An introduction, for those who see innovation as an opportunity.

Industry 4.0 is transforming current manufacturing practices. Big data, advanced robotics, industrial connectivity, …. All are impacting the manufacturing machines and processes with the goal to make production processes more flexible to deal with large variety of products, digitize all manufacturing steps to trace back relevant historical information, and create a digital signature of generated products that contains related information throughout its lifecycle.
Key enabler technologies that would allow this transformation are emerging and becoming more and more available: new sensor’s generation with smart connectivity, big-data compatible processors, collaborative robots, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, condition monitoring, …. When properly implemented in a manufacturing ecosystem, these technologies will transform conventional manufacturing into smart manufacturing.
In this presentation, we will showcase some practical examples where these topics and their impact on manufacturing are clearly highlighted.
Some of these examples are related to Smart Clamping for (CNC) machining centers, digital signature of an additively manufactured product, smart fleet with interconnected condition monitoring systems, digital instruction and their usage by collaborative robots.

In 2015 sloegen ENGIE Fabricom, ENGIE Laborelec, een kenniscentrum voor de gehele groep- en de KULeuven de handen in elkaar om een 3D-metaaldrukproces op te zetten voor de industrie. Dit om de groep en zijn servicing activiteiten te ondersteunen met een complementaire technologie. Graag komen zij hun bevindingen en uitdagingen delen en dit aan de hand van enkele cases bespreken.

Status report: What’s the technology capable of? Why consider Additive Manufacturing for your company? What’s a viable business case? And how do you start using AM? An introduction, for those who see innovation as an opportunity.

Driven by our own research in smart structures, a hybrid manufacturing platform based on two Direct Energy Deposition machines combined with subtractive processes are built in-house at the department of Mechanical Engineering (www.avrg.be) of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Those machines should produce high precision metallic parts with integrated sensing. By presenting the beyond the state-of-the-art in hybrid manufacturing, we show how we think to manufacture the parts of the future with integrated structural health monitoring. Being both an end user for additive manufactured parts, as well as getting into the role of the machine tool builder, we obtained a unique insight in the current capabilities and limitations of additive and hybrid manufacturing. What kind of machine do we need to produce those parts of the future, and is current technology ready for this? Will Additive Manufacturing 2.0 be Hybrid Manufacturing?

Almost 10 years ago  the twin brothers Robbens set out to change the motorcycle business as we know it.
Reclaiming the rights to the one’s most famous brand Saroléa , they started the development of 100 % electric motorcycles.
To  challenge them in pushing the possibilities of technology they decided to race their bikes on the legendary Isle of Man TT.
A new high end model was developed , the road legal Saroléa MANX 7.
Tonight Bjorn Robbens will talk about the start, the challenges , the future of building a global motorcycle brand from Belgium

Many companies contemplate investments in 3D printing, but reaching a decision is hard.
For instance, how to compare and quantify:
• Improved functionality of products;
• Extra speed in product design;
• Better tooling;
• Lower stock levels?

In this session we help you to assess and compare benefits of 3D printing for your company. We use a proven tool, the 3D Part Tinder, to focus your attention on those aspects that will bring most return on your investments.

The  Moderator for this session is Onno Ponfoort, Practice Leader 3D Printing @ Berenschot. Onno is active in the 3D Printing arena for over 15 years and has supported many companies and consortia with the business and organisational side of using this technology. After all, the big question always is: how can we make money and get a good return on our investments?