The open call for FF4EuroHPC project proposals focused on the highest quality experiments involving innovative and agile SMEs, and requested project proposals that present the business challenges of European SMEs from different application domains. 68 high-quality applications from 25 European countries applied for the open call, and 16 of them from 9 countries were selected for funding.

After providing advisory support to companies in their applications for the Open Call, one of the submitted Croatian proposals was selected for funding. It is a project Multi-head Additive Manufacturing with Optimal HPC Thermal Stabilization - AMOTS implemented by the company Mikrotvornica d.o.o. in cooperation with the Ruđer Bošković Institute and the Center for Informatics and Computing. The vision of the accepted Croatian project is related to the use of industrial machines for additive production, where heat and its dissipation to individual structural elements play a major role. Namely, one aspect of the impact of heat is the heated working space inside the machine itself, given that most materials used in the automotive or aerospace industry require heated working chambers, either passively or actively heated.

The aim of the project is to establish and predict the impact of this heat on the structure and motion system of the machine by checks within simulations using HPC infrastructure, with the aim of improving the assembly and speeding up the calibration. This result could contribute to the improvement of additive production in the work with engineering materials and minimize the possibility of error, ie unwanted dimensional instability of the manufactured piece.

The experiment is divided into 3 phases:

    First phase: development of a digital model of the new machine assembly;
    Second phase: performing the first series of detailed simulations on the HPC infrastructure to examine the impact of heat in the new machine;
    Third phase: assembling a physical machine based on a simulation performed in the second phase of the experiment.

In conclusion, by an iterative process of HPC simulations and fine tuning of the machine, the machine will be calibrated and tested. The potential result of this project allows complete control over the parameters that affect the dimensional stability of 3D printed products.

The Croatian Competence Center for HPC will provide expert support in the application of HPC technologies to a selected project from Croatia through the activities of the EuroCC project. The project will be fully funded by EU funds, and its estimated duration is 1 year.

For more information on the results of the FF4EuroHPC Open Call, visit the official project website
.