Surface Engineering

The meeting held during the 24th month of the ECOXY project took place in Karlsruhe on 14- 5 May. The meeting took place at the Fraunhofer ICT centre, where the project participants reviewed the progress of the project over the last six months (M19-M24), the main results obtained and the next steps to be taken. Each WP leader explained the progress and results of their work package with the help of the participants involved in each of them.

CIDETEC was represented by Sarah Montes and Aratz Genua, who described both the technical and financial progress of the WP1 (Project management) work package.

The next meeting of the consortium will take place in November 2019 at AITIIP’s premises in Zaragoza.

Last April CIDETEC attended the Advanced Factories Trade Fair in Barcelona where it presented the challenges and opportunities of the post-processing of surfaces produced by additive manufacturing. The fair is aimed at improving the competitiveness of companies, from the implementation of process automation and digitisation to full integration with the technologies that are included in industry 4.0.

Until now, the industry has focused its efforts on the first two steps of additive manufacturing, namely, the design and manufacturing itself, but no similar progress has been made in the post-processing phase. An extremely high percentage of the parts obtained by additive manufacturing require the removal of substrates and/or a significant reduction in the surface roughness. The solutions currently used at an industrial level either require too many manual operations or involve a cost that, in most cases, represents half of the final cost of the part.

As part of Cidetec’s commitment to additive manufacturing, it has recently joined Addimat (Spanish Association of Additive and 3D Manufacturing Technologies) as well as being involved in specialised forums in the sector such as Advanced Factories and Addit3D.

All of this reinforces Cidetec’s position in the area of additive manufacturing post-processing, a field in which it is committed to cementing its leadership position through its presence and participation in the main initiatives developed in the industry.

With this in mind, on 6-7 November 2019, Cidetec Surface Engineering will be holding the PostAdditive 2019 conference in San Sebastian, where the latest advances and industrial opportunities in technologies related to the post-processing of materials produced through additive manufacturing will be discussed.

If you would like to learn more about this subject, you can read our recent publication in the Interempresas Fabricación aditiva magazine:

https://www.interempresas.net/Fabricacion-aditiva/Articulos/244884-Posprocesado-de-componentes-metalicos-producidos-por-tecnologias-de-fabricacion-aditiva.html

The technical seminar entitled “Polishing / ionic bombardment”, organised by CIDETEC Surface Engineering and LEICA Microsystems, will be held at the San Sebastian Technology Park on 16 May.

The aim of this seminar is to show the industry the advantages and good practices of ionic polishing for SEM and TEM. Those attending will have the opportunity to bring along their own samples and discuss with the specialists the best method and conditions for preparing them with this technique. The seminar will demonstrate how Leica EM TXP and Leica EM TIC3X can help to:

– Produce high quality cross-sections
– Perform flat surface polishing of almost any material
– Minimise deformation or damage during preparation

Programme:

Attendance, limited to a maximum of 25 people, is free but prior enrolment is required.

For more information and to enrol: santiago.sevillano@leica-microsystems.com

On 24 April, Corrosion Awareness Day is celebrated around the world in order to raise public awareness of a factor that has an enormous financial and safety impact. To give an idea of the scale of the problem, it is sufficient to say that each year corrosion is estimated to cause a loss of more than 2.5 billion US dollars worldwide, according to NACE data. This means that every few seconds 5 tons of steel are disintegrating, the equivalent of approximately 4 average weight cars.

In nature, metals occur in their oxidised state, mainly as oxide or sulphide minerals. The processing of metals from minerals requires a significant amount of energy to transform the ore into pure metal and, as a result, their thermodynamic inclination is to spontaneously return to their natural state: they corrode.

With only a few exceptions, the corrosion of metal is due to an irreversible reduction-oxidation (redox) reaction between the metal and an oxidising agent present in the surrounding environment. For this reason, corrosion can be defined as the set of physical-chemical phenomena by which the surface of a metal is attacked by the most diverse chemical agents. It is usually a natural and spontaneous process, the direct and indirect effects of which affect millions of people and limit the useful life of a variety of objects and equipment

Corrosion control and prevention, together with surface technology, are therefore of crucial importance for a technology-based society. One of the great challenges is to find innovative solutions, not only to prevent corrosion but also to take advantage of its positive aspects.

At CIDETEC we support the raising of awareness of what corrosion implies and we take part in the initiatives carried out on this day. To this end, on 19 June, the Seminar “Electrochemical methods for characterising and evaluating corrosion” will be held at the CIDETEC Surface Engineering premises in collaboration with GOMENSORO-METROHM.

The Clean Sky 2 event was held a two-day high-level conference on 9-10 April 2019 in Brussels, focusing on aeronautics research at its best and the future of the programme in Horizon Europe. The first day were feature speakers from the European aeronautics industry, the European Parliament and European Commission, as well as research centres and academia, while the second day was taken a closer look at achievements of the Clean Sky 2 so far.

During the CS2 poster session, Dr. Jaime Ochoa (Business Development Manager at Strategic Partnering Unit, CIDETEC) participated with a poster presentation showing the main goal of the ECOLAND project. ECOLAND is about developing a suitable REACH compliant anaphoretic electrocoating or “E-coat” treatment that can replace the currently used Cr(VI)-based anodising + painting (those will be prohibited starting in 2024) for protection of Al 7000 alloys in aeronautic applications.

Moreover, its environmental highlights and scaling up to industrial levels for the assessment of the TRL 5 achievement were shown.