AIMEN Technology Center leads the ORGANIC project. The organisation coordinates the project and is the main contact point for the communication with the European Commission, as the project is funded under Horizon Europe.
AI Senior Researcher Andrea Fernández Martínez coordinates the project: “What I find most exciting about the project is having the opportunity to work with such an international, multi-disciplinary consortium to use the benefits and the principles of nature to transform complex manufacturing processes.” With her technical background she not only has the overview of the project, but also dives deep, especially into anything relating to artificial intelligence.
Project Manager Alexandre Cunha makes sure to create a collaborative environment, joining knowledge and experiences that enable everybody to reach the ambitious goals of the project. He sees ORGANIC as a chance of revolutionising additive manufacturing. “I’m confident we will be one of the references in the next revolution of manufacturing – we are using the opportunity of bringing nature’s wonders into manufacturing!”
For smooth administration, Alba Fernández Alonso and Ana Torres Collazo take care of the financial, administrative and legal matters of the project. For Alba who got the project up and running, ORGANIC is the first so-called lump sum project, which aims at reducing administrative work by removing the need to report actual cost. Ana has taken over from her. “It offers me the chance to use financial and administrative management to support a very creative technological endeavour”, she comments. “It is particularly inspiring to contribute to the successful financial execution of a project with such a high potential impact on sustainable manufacturing and European industry.”
Involvement in artificial intelligence and self-learning capabilities
Besides coordinating and project-managing ORGANIC, AIMEN are also involved in tasks relating to artificial intelligence. This will enable the self-adaptive and evolutive capabilities of the ORGANIC system.
As a team leader of the AI Researchers, Santiago Muiños Landin will support the AI-oriented team specifically in the definition of the feedback loops to optimise the manufacturing process. He likes the idea of “having an open scenario to define information flows to optimise a process getting inspiration from natural processes.”
Senior AI Researcher Ramon Angosto Artigues will develop the generative AI for the topological optimization of the model based on bio-inspired structures and will also work in the development of the Reinforcement learning algorithms that will help with the constant improvements in the entire set up. He said: “I found the idea of using bio-inspired structures very interesting, as there are very simple structures in nature that are still not applied, but that have very interesting properties for this project and other tasks.”
With his experience as a PhD in Computational Physics, Senior Researcher Javier Fernández Troncoso will apply artificial intelligence and machine learning to experimental and simulation data. The aim is to discover patterns in data and perform reverse engineering, thus replacing the old-fashioned trial-and-error approach. He points out: “ORGANIC has a unique use case with a great impact on the industry. It’s great that all tasks are industry-oriented and are not about fundamental science, meaning that they can be easily translated into a commercial product or service.”
Alexandre Martín-Mestres leads the Process Digitalisation Team at AIMEN and takes case of digitalising the demo case. In ORGANIC, he sees the opportunity to “improve manufacturing processes though artificial intelligence”.
As an Industrial Digitalisation Developer from Alexandre’s team, Roberto Alonso Gómez will develop a software that allows any service to gather data from the additive manufacturing production cell and the sensors, which are integrated into the 3D printhead. “The challenge is taking different elements, allowing them to work seamlessly plus communicating real-time at the same time as trying out bio-based materials that we have not worked with before,” he explains. “Additive manufacturing is the most modular and adaptable kind of production. With recyclable materials, we could enter a more nature-friendly production era.”
A researcher in AI and data analysis, Beatriz Blanco-Filgueira also supports the project. She put it short and sweet what she likes about the project: “Applying biology to technology.”
Open additive manufacturing pilot line
With their open additive manufacturing pilot line, AIMEN plays an important role in the development of the additive manufacturing activities. They take part in hardware design and demonstration, will focus on the geometric design of the new bio-composite structures and develop the topology optimisation and generative design tools.
Pablo Romero Rodríguez leads the team focused on Additve Manufacturing of composite materials in AIMEN and will align interests and planning with Addcomposites, Aeroblade and 10XL, align with CARTIF and AIMEN on data as well as with National Technical University of Athens and Tampere University on materials. “It’s an exciting project on so many levels,” he said, “We develop new hardware, artificial intelligence will support design, we work on a complex demo case and have 3.5 years to work with a nice consortium. We will be able to make real impact in large area additive manufacturing by linking engineering with bio – we will be pioneers!”
This involves co-developing an additive manufacturing extruder with monitoring systems, generate and gather data during manufacturing, test the first version of the prototype by manufacturing a demo product of three metres length.
Senior Researcher on Pablo’s team Ander Reizábal will coordinate the partners working on the technology and enable the development of the advanced 3D printhead of the Fused Granulate Fabrication system, a specific technology in additive manufacturing commonly referred to as FGF by the additive manufacturing community. “We will evolve the hardware and software and reach a deep understanding of positive effects of evolved parameters and the optimisation when we develop the pilot,” Ander said. “I’m excited to replicate the organic evolution by taking advantage of all the physical and digital tools in the market and reach unprecedented process optimisation with nature as reference.”
Also an expert on additive manufacturing, Xabier Pérez takes care of additive manufacturing process development and demonstrator manufacturing. He shared that he found the “evolution of traditionally manual manufacturing processes to automatised novel technologies” particularly interesting.
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