About AFFIX
AFFIX aims to create a strong, competitive and environmentaly aware manufacturing sector in Europe, through the development of highly efficient and flexible systems which can respond to the assembly requirements of low volume, high value, large and flexible structures.
Our vision is to increase industrial competitiveness by reducing overall manufacturing costs by 40%.
In the new manufacturing paradigm the emphasis is on manufacturing low numbers of high value components. In the aerospace and automotive sectors product differentiation is achieved through the manufacture of cheaper, lighter, greener products. This is leading to the need to assemble lighter, flexible, complex, components manufactured from innovative materials including titanium alloys, composites and metal-composite sandwich materials.
Using reduction in lead time, inventory, tooling cost and assembly cost as business drivers, the AFFIX IP will develop tools, technologies and techniques to align, hold and fix these components using new concepts of assembly systems with high reconfiguration capability.
EU Manufacturing - a changing landscape
Strong international competition means that future products must satisfy the customer's requirements in cost, quality and timely delivery, and mass customisation is providing EU manufacturers with the required competitive edge in the world market. As such, an integrated production environment is required that supports rapid reconfiguration at a cost-effective level. This will lead to better utilisation of manufacturing equipment across the EU to support a manufacturing industry dominated by Small Manufacturing Enterprises (SMEs).
Fixturing - current state of play
Designed specifically for a product and process, regular fixtures cannot be reconfigured/reused for different products/processes and specialised fixtures are only economical within a mass production environment. Furthermore, modular fixtures are time-consuming to design and construct and do not provide the required repeatability for components and processes involving high-accuracy. To further complicate matters, there is no active control of the fixtures during the manufacturing process and during component loading/unloading and as a result, manufacturing precision is compromised
AFFIX solving problems
AFFIX will create highly flexible, adaptive assembly systems, which can quickly be reconfigured to cope with a wide variety of components bringing the benefits of mass production automated assembly to smaller volume high value complex and difficult to handle components and structures. Knowledge and intelligence will be developed in the virtual world and used to manage and control the adaptive assembly system. The system will have the capability to consider both the behaviour of the component and the assembly system. A novel aspect of the work will be the introduction of the concept of automated and flexible disassembly and reuse technology into the work place. This option only becomes available when the technologies envisaged for flexible automated assembly are put into place and demonstrated on an industrial scale.
