SMAART · The breakthrough laser machining intelligence as saver of jobs and competitiveness for Europe's manufacturing business

EUR 9.01 trillion – this is the shockingly high amount of added value in manufacturing, which drained off from Europe to other world regions (particularly to regions with low production factor costs like Asia) in the last years. The reason for this can be mainly seen in cost differences of production factors. To retrieve added value to Europe, particularly manufacturing and machining processes have to be improved to greater efficiency. Driven by the vision of Smart Factories of the Future and Industry 4.0, the European Commission therefore starts a lot of initiatives, like the Digital Single Market in 2016. The EC expects that digitisation of products and services can add more than EUR 110 billion of annual revenue in Europe in the next five years. A technology predestined for making machining more efficient and for implementing Industry 4.0 in manufacturing is laser technology (as processing is contactless and therefore very flexible), especially the next level of laser machining based on ultrashort laser pulses resulting in high precision never existed before. Up to now, existing laser machining systems are fixed to only one incorporated laser and therefore limited in parameters and application. This results in the need of having many different laser systems for different applications and in long retooling and adjustment times. For the broad introduction of advanced laser machining in Europe’s manufacturing industry, neoLASE and GFH will during this project integrate the prototype of unique laser amplifier technology in a modular, self-adjusting and self-intelligent laser machining system to reach the next level of manufacturing. This system incorporates several seed lasers and optics, all combinable by the amplifier technology, and therefore has the functionalities of many laser systems in only one machine. This meets actual needs of economically producing highly individualised and customised products like implants also with a lot comprising one single item.