The WAVETAILOR project addresses the growing complexity of modern manufacturing and assembly by developing advanced solutions to enhance efficiency, reduce costs, and minimise environmental impact.
Project Description
The increasing complexity of products, manufacturing processes, and assembly systems highlights the need for innovative solutions to streamline operations, enhance efficiency, and reduce costs while minimising environmental impact. The EU-funded WAVETAILOR project seeks to address these challenges by leveraging modular laser sources to enable high-precision manufacturing of complex material structures and by developing solutions for disassembly, reuse, and recycling of components. The project aims to achieve these goals while significantly reducing the environmental footprint of both the manufacturing processes and the components themselves.
To realise this vision, WAVETAILOR is developing a flexible, energy-efficient photonic setup that offers complete adaptability to diverse energy and resource requirements. The project integrates advanced strategies, including Zero Defect Manufacturing (ZDM) and Zero Defect Welding (ZDW), to optimise and control product compatibility during production. WAVETAILOR will demonstrate its solutions in two industrial scenarios, both involving complex multi-material components and assemblies.
Objective
The WAVETAILOR project is focused on two specific industrial use cases:
- The directed energy deposition (DED) of a multi-material leading edge for a hypersonic hydrogen-powered aircraft.
- The powder bed fusion (PBF) of a complex multi-material assembly for an urban delivery drone.
Both scenarios present significant challenges related to zero-defect manufacturing, sustainability, and first-time-right production. WAVETAILOR aims to address these challenges by advancing high-precision manufacturing of complex material structures, improving processes for disassembly, reuse, and recycling of components, and reducing the environmental footprint.
The project is built around three core pillars:
- Flexible and energy-efficient photonic setup: This setup is based on a modular diode-based laser source and multi-wavelength optics.
- Full reconfigurability: The photonic setup is designed to minimise energy and material use while addressing the specific requirements of the two use cases.
- ZDM and ZDW strategies: These strategies operate at multiple levels, including machine level, shop floor level, and within decentralised manufacturing chains. The approach incorporates digital siblings (for shop floor-level monitoring) and digital twins (for cloud-level assessment) to enable automatic evaluation of component and assembly designs for circularity. It also facilitates first-time-right process planning using synthetic legacy data, alongside real-time process and post-process monitoring to ensure defect-free production.
When fully implemented, WAVETAILOR's innovations are expected to deliver significant environmental and economic benefits:
- Reduction of energy consumption by 200 MWh.
- Decrease in waste generation by 923 kg.
- Lowering of production costs by 50–65%.
A comprehensive sustainability study will be conducted throughout the project to validate these outcomes. WAVETAILOR's success will demonstrate a transformative approach to sustainable, high-precision manufacturing for complex multi-material applications.