Seltec

SelTec - Selektive Oberflächenbearbeitung und -herstellung für Verbundbauteile

The production of composite parts for the aerospace industry still involves a significant amount of manual work. Tasks such as filling, grinding, activating of surfaces and removal of small defects in the surface still require manual work. This leads to high costs of composite parts, especially for those that require high surface quality (e.g. interior parts). The costs are currently limiting the wider use of such materials in the aerospace industry.

This project aims at providing a solution by performing research in two different directions. Intelligent automation systems will be developed that integrate CAD data, sensor information and flexible manufacturing systems in order to automate production steps that are currently done manually. The focus will be on achieving high quality and on performing the tasks selectively and only in those areas of the part that need to be treated. As an alternative approach research will be done on in-mould-coating processes using highly reactive powder coatings. This will enable the creating of high surface quality in a single process step and those remove the need for any (manual) pre-treatment of surfaces.

The combination of these approaches will achieve a reduction of manual work by 40%-50%. The cheaper production process will enable a wider application of composite parts, so that the aerospace industry will benefit from increase load capacity, reduced fuel consumption of airplanes and fewer CO2 and NOx emissions.

Besides the project coordination the machine vision group of Profactor will carry out the following research activities:

• development of a photometric stereo sensors for capturing the surface properties of carbon fiber reinforced plastics and composite parts
• development of methods for the automated segmentation and classification of surface areas that require selective post-processing

• integration of these methods into an intelligent and flexible manufacturing system for the production of composite parts.

Further information www.seltec-project.at