DIgital LAser PROduction: Digital Twins of Laser Processing for Multi-Capability Manufacturing of Complex Components and Certification

Making Europe the first digitally led circular, climate-neutral and sustainable economy needs major changes across manufacturing: efficiencies in energy and material consumption, new solutions to problems in certification and standardisation, and upskilling of the European workforce. DILAPRO contributes to all of these, driving decarbonisation and the twin Green and Digital Transitions via two ground-breaking software tools for laser-based production of complex products. DILAFACT (Digital Laser Factory) is a sustainable and scalable platform for laser process planning via Digital Twins of laser-material interactions, including additive, subtractive, and thermal processes. DILACERT (Digital Laser Certification) tackles a major hurdle in rapidly-developing laser and additive manufacturing technologies: certification and standardisation. In the short DILACERT enables end users to easily process production data for certification; in the long term it paves the way for remote semiautomated digital certification of produced parts, a major paradigm shift in complex part production. DILAPRO grounds its development in specific materials (316L, IN718, IN625) and laser technologies (PBF-LB, DED-LB, and Laser Texturing) as deployed on 6 operational production lines owned by project partners. These will be developed as distinct modules during the first half of the project, and synthesised into DILAFACT and DILACERT in the project’s second half. To ensure the competitiveness and sustainability of European manufacturing in the long term, other developers and end-users will be able to contribute modules to both software, kick-started by DILAPRO’s living communities and innovative IP plan covering both commercial and OA licenses. DILAPRO offers two scalable, sustainability-focused solutions for the European laser-based, high-precision manufacturing industry, and will thus not simply develop a single one-off product, but a resilient force-multiplier for the long term.