Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development
Industry: Online "SUPERcraft", a platform for digital design and craftsmanship
SUPERcraft is an innovative web platform of advanced design and digital craftsmanship designed to share highly technological tools and services and guarantee companies the product personalization from conception to manufacture, conducted as part of a project, co-funded by the Emilia-Romagna Region, which includes ENEA (with the CROSS-TEC Laboratory of the Bologna Research Center), Romagna Tech (coordinator), Mister Smart Innovation, UniBo (University of Bologna) and UniMoRe (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia).
“This is a hi-tech manufacturing revolution, supported by new digital artisans and guaranteed by innovative technologies like 3D printing.
Compared to traditional production processes, the use of digital and additive manufacturing technologies allows us to provide a concrete response to the growing demand for product customization posed by the market", explained Sergio Petronilli, ENEA researcher at the CROSS-TEC Laboratory and head of the Unit PROTO-LAB, operative for rapid prototyping and reverse engineering, who coordinated the project together with Alessio Ubertini, Alex Coppola and Gianluca D'Agosta.
"Thanks to this new platform, companies in the same supply chain will be able to further develop the object design, with the possibility of quickly and cheaply manufacture limited series or unique, personalised items. Furthermore, the new digital artisans will be able to 'explore' the potential of distributed and collaborative production strategies that these technologies enable ", said Petronilli.
The ENEA team at the Bologna Research Center has developed, in particular, the Interactive Generative Modeling (IGM) technology, necessary to implement the 3D web platform for product customization, with a ' Continuous Mass Customazation ' approach.
"In this way, each actor in the production chain, even without having CAD modeling skills, can fine-tune his own 3D model, configuring it interactively among the thousands possible combinations available on the platform and sending it to a Rapid Manufacturing System where integrated 3D printing technologies can manufacture it in the most varied materials ”, pointed out Petronilli.
Among the Emilia-Romagna companies involved in this project, the case study developed with Galletti SpA to create an interactive 3D web system for the configuration of an air conditioning system was particularly interesting, once the layout of the environment to be air-conditioned had been defined.
The Emilia-Romagna manufacturing district comprises a large number of artisans and SMEs very active in the area that need to tackle product innovation to meet today's customer demand but above all to anticipate future trends.
"In this interconnected era, digital natives are increasingly looking for innovative designs and intelligent products to deal with for the most varied purposes and uses. SUPERcraft also enables an increasingly radical 'functionalization' of the product, centered on potential users through the development of items connected to the network, thanks to a combination of mainly 'ICT-oriented' modules and technologies and a “shelf innovation ” approach, concluded Petronilli.
Photo & Video gallery
Figure 1 - Example of application of Interactive Generative Modeling technology for Continuous Mass Customization in the interactive 3D web design of an armchair. Once the configuration has been chosen among the thousands available on the platform, the 3D file to be sent to the Rapid Manufacturing System to manufacture the chair can be Downloaded
Figure 2 - Example of application of the interactive 3D web platform on a mobile device
