Italian SME offers virtual prototyping services for supporting R&D projects on innovative products and processes. Services include FEA, CFD and testing and apply to multiple fields including steel-industry, metalworking, composites, structural assessment.

Short summary The SME was funded in 2015 and supports industry in the development of new processes and products with its VIRTUAL LAB. The Company embeds engineers with multidisciplinary competencies and 20 years’ experience in the steel industry, metalworking processes, composite materials, structural assessment and others. Expertise ranges from experimental testing to structural and fluid dynamics simulation of plants and devices. The Company has experience in EU projects coordination/participation.

Full description The traditional innovation process consists in the empirical trial-and-error process, which also implies long and expensive processes for physical prototyping, testing, assessing and improving. The continuous reiteration of this method leads to uncertain results and it reveals not to be fully reliable, nor cost-effective. The Company proposes an alternative approach, based on its “VIRTUAL LAB”, a set of testing and numerical (FEA/CFD) competencies allowing simulating the performance of new products and processes with no need of physical prototyping. Thanks to this approach, the influence of all parameters of the prototype (e.g. geometry, size, materials, features, etc.) are simulated and optimized properly, avoiding unnecessary costs for tentative design and manufacturing. Moreover, virtual modeling allows simulating of the performances of the new product/process in certain circumstances, which can be hardly tested in real labs or plants for multiple reasons, e.g. size, costs, safety, time constraints and others. The Company is an Italian Small Medium Enterprise (SME) funded in 2015. Its mission is to assist industry with R&D services supporting innovation, assessment and design of new processes and new products with a boost of expertise in simulation technologies. Since its birth, the Company has successfully supported industry in more than 50 projects including both industrial and funded projects. These spread in multiple fields, mostly: steel industry, combustion, heat exchange, energy optimization in steel plants, and Heat Ventilation Air Conditioning (HVAC), composite materials, turbomachines. The personnel has documented experience in EU projects coordination/participation. Moreover, since 2020 the Company is coordinating an EU RFCS-funded project including 8 Partners across 4 EU countries.

Advantages and innovations A major hurdle in the implementation of product/process innovation resides in the high costs and uncertainties related to physical prototyping. The adoption of state-of-art technologies and expertise for virtual prototyping allows shortcutting from innovation to application by avoiding recursive prototyping, with clear resources/time saving. Moreover, the use of virtual prototyping allow predicting the performance of complex systems under a number of different operating conditions by avoiding long and costly lab testing. In general, the embedding of high-level expertise on experimental, FEA, CFD competences require long time and large resources, but their implementation in industrial processes is only requested on specific hi-cut projects. For these reasons, industry is often discouraged to invest in those technologies and professional profiles. The Company overcome this hurdle and proposes its “on-demand” services for boosting specific R&D projects. This is a clear advantage for industry, which can take advantage of hi-end profiles and technologies by avoiding any investment in training and infrastructures

Contact / source: NEXT EEN Widgets (europa.eu)