SEAM hosts EU project dissemination event

Project gives WIT's South Eastern Applied Materials Research Centre a great opportunity to expose its capabilities and expertise to other EU member state institutions

REALISM, a European Commission funded FP7-SME project which WIT's SEAM (South Eastern Applied Materials) Research Centre was co-ordinating held their final dissemination event in WIT recently.  

The project acronym REALISM which stands for ‘Real-Time In-Situ Monitoring of Tool Wear in Precision Engineering Applications’ is a two-year project commenced in January of 2014. The project involved three SMEs and four academic institutes from four countries (Ireland, Norway, Poland and Italy) who came together to overcome issues relating to high scrap rates caused by tool wear in the precision engineering sector.

The dissemination event included presentation of results from all partners and demonstration of the sensor fusion system developed that intelligently interrogates sensor data from the CNC operation to provide real time tool information to the production operator.  The demonstration was held at Schivo, a precision engineering company based in Waterford, a lead SME partner in the project.   The event was attended by select precision engineering industry delegates and academic institute members.

Speaking at the event, Dr Ramesh Raghavendra, Project Co-ordinator and SEAM Centre Director said, this project provided SEAM a great opportunity to expose its capabilities and expertise to other EU member state institutions and also the opportunity to lead an EU consortium to develop a new solution to a long standing problem facing the precision engineering industry.  Dr Raghavendra added, “This project has given the base to target H2020 programmes in this and other areas of SEAM expertise and we will aim to use it to other indigenous companies such as Schivo, thus bringing in more investment for Waterford and the South-East region.”

An industry dedicated materials research and development facility,  SEAM (South Eastern Applied Materials) Research Centre located at Waterford Institute of Technology, has been a success story in expanding opportunities in the Medical Device, Precision Engineering, Pharma and Energy Sectors in Ireland. See www.seam.ie for more information about the SEAM research centre activities.

About consortium members:

SME partners include Schivo, a precision engineering company based in Ireland, Tulino, an SME based in Italy, who design and fabricate parts, tools and fixtures for aerospace and biomedical industries and IDT, an engineering firm, based in Norway. The Research and Technology (RTD) providers included WIT specialising in materials analysis and electronics, Warsaw University of Technology (WUT, Poland), specialising in machine monitoring, University of Naples (UNINA, Italy), specialising in sensor and decision making systems and Gjøvik University College, specialising in social impact and increased knowledge transfer as a result of implementing process monitoring systems.