Automation

The manufacturing of products made of fiber-reinforced plastics (FRP) often still involves a number of manual work steps: the position and orientation of the semi-finished fiber-reinforced materials must be aligned precisely by hand to ensure that the product has the required levels of stability and flexibility after lamination and curing. Ultimately, this is the only way of enabling the user to fully exploit the advantages of the FRP material. To support the manual deposition process, known as preforming, the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology IPT in Aachen, Germany, has developed intuitive software for commercially available augmented reality glasses: The system specifies the correct deposition of the semi-finished materials as a virtual representation on the mold and can thus significantly improve the quality and performance of FRP production processes.

Due to the increasing global spread of Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and based on the recommendations of the German Federal Government and the Bavarian State Government, Messe München feels compelled to postpone automatica 2020. This measure has been taken in consultation with the VDMA Robotics + Automation Association as conceptual sponsor and in responsibility for the health of exhibitors and visitors. automatica 2020 will instead take place from December 8 to 11, 2020.

The Bundesnetzagentur has been laying the foundation for campus networks, i.e. a company’s own network on factory premises. Fraunhofer FOKUS and partners from industry and science work on technical implementation of such private networks.

On 6-8 October 2020, the international event organiser Easyfairs will launch a Dutch edition of its successful Welding Week in conjunction with NIL (Dutch Institute for Welding Technology) at Evenementenhal Gorinchem. The event will replace NIL Verbindingsweek with the new branding “Welding Week powered by NIL”.

In future Composites Europe and the trade association Composites Germany will cooperate even more closely and organise the International Composites Conference (ICC) jointly from 2019. The conference structure will be significantly revised and the former separation between trade fair and lecture events will end.