An initial test campaign has recently been completed at Fraunhofer ICT. As part of this campaign the control systems and sensors of the mold provided by Alpex Technologies, RTM equipment and press have been integrated to allow for consistent process data acquisition. A production-ready cycle time was achieved, and a large batch of 400 components was produced. Each individual component is identifiable in the resulting dataset.

During the next stage of the program these components will be machined at Hufschmied Zerspanungssysteme GmbH. The generated structure borne sound sensor data and quality inspection results will be merged to the existing database.

Concurrently work has started on the derivation of data-based quality criteria and process performance indicators. These will be validated in a second test campaign later in the project.

This effort will be supported by tool wear characterization carried out both for the milling tools as well as the HP-RTM mold throughout the project, demonstrating the power of process chain wide data integration and learning.