ENGINE

About the project

The overall goal of ENGINE is to reduce the environmental impact and improve competitiveness of metal product manufacturers by developing a novel metal product design and manufacturing system, which integrates LCA in design and business decisions, reduces defects, waste, and shrinks product time-to-market.

The outcomes are:

1. Create and demonstrate a novel metal product design and manufacturing system.
2. Develop a computational modelling toolbox for product and process design, non-destructive diagnostic tools for production monitoring, and data solution for seamless integration of the whole supply-chain.
3. Research methodologies for first-time-right and zero-defect manufacturing (ZDM).
4. Investigate LCA and life-cycle cost (LCC) methods for design and business decisions.
5. Present a strategy for employee skills development.
6. Transform innovations into promising business cases. 

Background

Manufactured metal products ranging from nuts, bolts, cutlery to boilers, valves and engines are used daily by most of the people on the planet, and the global metal products market is expected to grow from 2.1T USD in 2020 to 3.1T USD by 2025. The manufacturing process is energy-intensive and requires substantial amounts of natural and financial resources. Moreover, defective components and engines cannot be easily reworked or recycled without significant effort. The vision of ENGINE is to create a modular, first-time-right, and zero-defect metal product design and manufacturing system that improves manufacturer sustainability, resilience, and competitiveness.

Europeans demand minimal environmental impact of industry with 93% seeing climate change as a serious problem and 51% thinking that business and industry are responsible for tackling it. Environmental impact can be reduced by shrinking manufacturing footprint and increasing the attractiveness of products with low lifetime footprint. The first will be tackled by shifting the design process to first-time-right manufacturing to digital space and employing zero-defect manufacturing systems. The second will be addressed by reducing product time-to-market, manufacturing waste, and integrating lifecycle assessments (LCA) in design and business decisions. An overview of the project activities can be seen in Figure 1:

Figure 1: Project overview