A CONSORTIUM OF COMPLEMENTARY EXPERTISE

Aernnova is a leading aerostructures company specialized in the design and manufacturing of aerostructures and components such as empennages, wings and fuselage sections. With revenues over 700 million euros, we are the first Tier 1 in Spain and the 10th worldwide. Their main business lines are: integral management of complete aerostructures (conceptual design, testing, certification, prototypes and in-services technical support), engineering expertise in specialized in research and development of component design, fabrication of composite components, fabrication of metallic components. These four business units, integrate, organize and manage more than 40 companies which are located in eight Spanish provinces (Alava, Cadiz, Madrid, Orense, Seville, Toledo, Zaragoza and Barcelona) and abroad in Brazil, Mexico, Romania, China, UK and United States.

Aernnova will be responsible of validation of the first and second generation to demonstrate the efficiency of tooling system and monitor the operational conditions/cure monitoring, required for manufacturing of aeronautical composite components.

Airtificial is a leading international company in development of intelligent structures and collaborative robotics. Airtificial accumulates decades of experience in the field of engineering and automated and robotic systems applied to various sectors such as Aerospace, Defence, Automotive, Civil Works, Renewables, Energy Efficiency and Building. Airtificial’s products are present in many of the world’s most important civil and military aeronautical programmes, as well as in some more recent space programmes, having developed its own know-how and technology for producing composite parts and structures of very different kinds. Airtificial manufactures as well all kind of composite parts for the most advanced civil and military aircrafts of Airbus.

Airtificial is one of the end-user partners in the SEER consortium. With its wide experience in the manufacturing of composite parts and structures for different industries, Airtificial will overtake the role of defining the industrial requirements for the project and evaluate the potential optimisation of the industrial processes involved. Airtificial will simulate and test the tooling developed, giving the final validation of the system.

Argotech is a private company located in Trutnov, Czech Republic. The company was founded in 2006, based on a tradition of microelectronics fabrication in the region, after the restructuring of Siemens and Infineon Technologies. The company is focusing on manufacturing, engineering and development services for opto- and micro-electronics. It provides a unique technology chain, starting from wafer-level packaging to full optical subassembly, customized packaging solutions included. Packaging customization offers solutions in cases when components available on the market do not provide required functionality and performance. Recent activities focus on RF design packaging towards to 100Gb/s NRZ, optical coupling of visible lasers to 2.5µm-SMFs and edge and grating coupling of fibre arrays with UV curable fixation.

Argotech's objectives contain proper alignment of fibre over sensor micro-lensed head, full sensor assembly in metal rod and cost analysis of proposed assembly solution.

Brunel Composites Centre is part of the Institute of Materials and Manufacturing of Brunel University. Principal mission is to establish a world class research centre offering high quality research. There are various ongoing research including multiscale composite FEA, interfacial phenomena at the interface of composites to other materials, physicochemical processes studies including processing of composites, molecular modelling of nanocomposites, embedding of smart structures in composites and joining of composites with other materials.

BRU will provide support in different aspects of the overall technology, namely fabrication and inspection of tooling prototypes (WP5), modelling (WP4), through-the-thickness integration of the sensing modules (WP6), and validation of the technology (WP7). Finally, they lead the activities connected to the life cycle and cost analyses of each element comprising the SEER solution (WP8).

Cranfield University is an exclusively postgraduate institution and a global leader for transformational research and education in technology and management. It is in the top 50 in the world for Engineering - Mechanical, Aeronautical and Manufacturing (QS world rankings 2018). The work within the project is carried out in the Enhanced Composites and Structures Centre which focuses on the investigation and development of novel processing technologies for lightweight structures and has expertise on processes associated with composites manufacturing including but not limited to autoclaving, liquid composite moulting tufting and z-pinning as well on composite manufacturing simulation and optimisation.

Cranfield University is leading the work on integration of the sensing system into composite tooling using through thickness reinforcement technologies (WP6 of the project) and also contributing to heat transfer process simulation and the development of surrogate process models utilised in the development of the control system (WP4).

ETS is a young SME, offering expertise and innovative solutions in the areas of industrial measurement/automation and Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). The philosophy of ETS is to design and integrate application-specific solutions with high flexibility in customization, that may meet the specific needs and requirements of the customer. Making use of advanced, state of the art, signal processing solutions, ETS produces products of expanded capabilities that exploit to the maximum the measured data information.

In the context of the SEER project, ETS will lead the activities on the development and implementation of the SEER prototype system for the real-time process optimization and thermal management in WP4. Furthermore, ETS will support NTUA to the signal processing and modelling activities for correlating the photonic sensor’s readings with critical manufacturing process parameters in WP 4.

Innovative enterprises active in diverse areas of Photonics related technologies, have joined forces to create the first photonics cluster in Greece, the Hellenic Photonics Cluster (HPhos). HPhos is established in the beginning of 2015 as an independent, private, non-profit legal entity. HPhos comprises a founding core of knowledge-intensive enterprises and research organizations, offering a fertile ecosystem that encourages the transfer of knowledge and expertise. It aims to become a critical support infrastructure to new entrepreneurship and extroversion of Greek enterprises and to provide networking channels to foreign enterprises and investors.

HPhos, having the experience in photonics industry, will support the TWI to develop and implement a dissemination plan to communicate project output and increase awareness about SEER technologies among the scientific community, industrial stakeholders, and the general public.

The Institute of Communications and Computer Systems of the National Technical University of Athens (ICCS/NTUA) was founded in 1989, as the research arm of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the NTUA (SECE-NTUA), with which it is associated, in the field of telecommunications systems and computer systems. The primary mandate of ICCS/NTUA has been to provide the facilities and organizational environment through which research could be performed and through which post-graduate students could receive research stipends and researchers could be employed. At present ICCS/NTUA employs more than 500 researchers including SECE faculty staff, senior research scientists, and PhD students. ICCS/NTUA will participate in SEER through the Photonics Communications Research Laboratory (PCRL) research group. PCRL (www.photonics.ntua.gr) was founded and led by Prof. Hercules Avramopoulos in 1995 as a research group of NTUA and currently numbers 5 Senior Researchers and 12 PhD students.

ICCS/NTUA is the project coordinator and leads WP1 with the assistance of TWI. ICCS/NTUA has undertaken the technical coordination and will employ its expertise in photonic devices to design, model and test the integrated photonic sensor. ICCS/NTUA will use its knowhow on developing smart algorithms to develop and implement the machine learning algorithms that will be used to optimize the predictive model of the SEER system and how this will reflect in the process, monitoring, optimization and control unit (PMOC).

Imec aims to be the world-leading R&D and innovation hub in nanoelectronics and digital technologies. As a trusted partner for companies, startups and academia we bring together brilliant minds from all over the world in a creative and stimulating environment. By leveraging our world-class infrastructure and local and global ecosystem of diverse partners across a multitude of industries, we are accelerating progress towards a connected, sustainable future.

The imec group CMST, experienced in photonic packaging, is involved in the SEER project and will contribute to the development and the packaging of the optical sensors in SEER.

Loiretech designs and manufactures complete sets of tooling for large and complex composite, thermoplastic and metallic parts, from forming or moulding to inspection operations. Our main customers belong to the commercial aerospace, automotive, defence and energies industries. Loiretech company is located in the West of France, close to Nantes in the Jules Verne Manufacturing Valley which combines the skills of aerospace structures manufacturers, composites materials suppliers, high-level engineering schools and the largest European technical centre dedicated to advanced manufacturing technologies.

In a nutshell, on SEER project, Loiretech will be responsible for manufacturing tooling demonstrators. They will integrate sensors defined by the consortium and allow parts manufacturing according to the end-user specifications.

TWI is a world leading research and technology organisation. Bases in the UK, North America, South East Asia, China, Australia, Central Asia, India and the Middle East see 800 staff provide technical support in joining and technologies such as material science, structural integrity, NDT, surfacing, electronic packaging and cutting. Services include generic research, contract R&D, technical information, consultancy, standards drafting, training and qualification. TWI offers a single, impartial source of service for joining engineering materials. TWI is internationally renowned for its multidisciplinary teams that implement established or advanced joining technology solving problems at any stage – from initial design, materials selection, production and quality assurance, through service performance and repair.