Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology ILT
Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology ILT

Digital Light Factory

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Our Services

Continuous production in industry is a decisive success factor for today's business. Future production will require additional evaluation and ramp-up phases in which concepts can be tested and processes developed. This form of production creates needs a test environment or an integration environment that brings the developed processes together and optimizes them with regard to functionality and productivity. In this way, operational risks and optimization potentials can be identified quickly and before the start of production.

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The Digital Light Factory of the technology focus digitalisation provides an individual and isolated development, validation and ramp-up environment. At its core, it comprises the manufacturing technology with all required control and automation interfaces. Depending on the targeted Industry 4.0 Maturity Index, this environment is fully integrated into a virtual or real Manufacturing Execution System (MES) or Enterprise Resource Planning System (ERP). From integration to start-up test, infrastructure is available that is similar or equal to the later production conditions, depending on the customer’s requirements. The resources of the Fraunhofer ILT offer a choice of building blocks ranging from automation and simulation to sensor technology, so that additional solutions can be integrated.

We bring technological components and solutions into real production.

Manufacturing environment

  • Use of manufacturing systems in combination with customer-specific equipment such as sensors, processing heads, beam shaping optics
  • Installation of customer-specific production systems for evaluation during production start-up
  • Establishment of process chains to identify production-critical components and to evaluate optimization potential

Industry 4.0 laboratory

  • Installation of solution components in the virtual factory to investigate function scenarios and complete interfaces
  • Expansion of the integration and functional scope of manufacturing systems to increase the Industry 4.0 Maturity Index

Technological development

  • Development of complete demonstrators for the validation of new technologies in the context of real production conditions
  • Evaluation of transferability scenarios of existing system solutions to new fields of application

Branches

Laser technology contributes to the digitisation in various industries. Whether as a material processing tool in automotive manufacturing, as a measuring device in the environmental sector, as a diagnostic or therapeutic instrument in medical technology or as a communication medium in space technology, the laser offers multiple application possibilities with high productivity and high efficiency.

You will find further information and a selection of our products and services on the industry websites.

Digital Light Factory

Our contributions in this range of services for start-up tests, solution validation in a production environment and for integration tests with fully mapped digital production interfaces.

Contribution

  • Machining centres for surface structuring with complete integration from design to measurement
  • Manufacturing systems with synchronous sensors for characterization of process boundary conditions and process information content
  • Coaxial Process Control (CPC) modular system for complete digital networking in the production environment
  • Microservices for flexible integration of system solutions and production machines
  • Modules for controlling multi-scanner systems
  • Software for digital optical beam shaping
  • Control systems for laser material processing based on machine-learned models
  • Digital measurement technology for seamless system integration
  • Voxel-based process control for geometry-dependent controlled energy input at LPBF
  • Multi-scanner processing strategies with path planning and scan field assignment at LPBF
  • System solutions for the complete tracking of process flows from planning to documentation
  • Edge Devices for transparent system integration
  • Data center with virtualized server structure and failover
  • Infrastructure with high-performance storage systems for the transmission of large amounts of data
  • Scientific DataHub as Exploration Platform for Data Lake Analysis and AI Integration

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