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MecaTech: Mechanical engineering is undergoing a major mutation with the explosion of digital and industry 4.0

Interview with Mr Anthony VAN PUTTE, Managing director of the MecaTech competitiveness cluster

© MecaTech

What is the MecaTech Competitiveness Cluster’s ambition? Our aim is to help create a Wallonia that is reinvented for its population, a region that supports individual initiatives and in which launching a business is easy; a Wallonia that is committed to meeting today’s environmental, health, and mobility challenges without forsaking its industrial fabric; one that allows the creation of fair and meaningful jobs.

And its mission? Our mission is to support corporate transformation to create the jobs and business of the future by engineering and carrying out innovative projects with international ambitions. The cluster’s aim is to help develop technology to serve human beings and to support the companies and organizations that show a desire to create value in and for Wallonia. What are the strategic directions the the Cluster focuses on? MecaTech Competitiveness Cluster’s area of activity is mechanical engineering, which is undergoing a major mutation with the explosion of digital and industry 4.0. This transverse field supports product and machine development in almost all markets, with the MecaTech Competitiveness Cluster’s priorities being energy, environment, transportation, defense and security, construction, medicine, and industry. The MecaTech Cluster wants to boost the development of mechanical engineering firms inside highgrowth-potential markets by: - developing their projects through innovative collaborative projects; - increasing their competitiveness by taking up industry 4.0 technologies and optimizing their material and energy resources; - acquiring skills that are useful for developing and implementing these advanced technologies; and - internationalizing their activities by hooking them up to complementary international ecosystems.

What are the keys to a successful project? Several criteria are indeed essential for or at least facilitate labeling a project. Let me start by mentioning the human aspect: choosing a good project leader, a person who will know how to get the partners to work together and advance in the right direction. The right choice of partners is also important, as much as setting and distributing the tasks correctly. Next, the project must fit in with the company’s long-term general strategy in order to optimize the benefits of the project’s outcomes. Finally, the project leader must have a good understanding of the market and meet a real need. S/he must not make the mistake of doing the opposite, that is to say, developing a product and then hoping to create a need or demand.

Are Wallonia’s SMEs ready for the digital revolution? Wallonia has a very heterogeneous SME fabric when it comes to maturity vis-à-vis the digital revolution, which is already very present today. Some SMEs are very active in the 4.0 dynamic and are constantly striving to improve in various technological and digital fields. The actions taken with these companies are basically network creation, specific aid, or actions to lead them to the most advanced 4.0 technologies, such as AR/VR and Big Data. These enterprises can and must become sources of inspiration for the other Walloon SMEs and must help accelerate their forward movement. For a certain number of SMEs, the changes that are required trigger fears that are rooted in and founded on rational or supposedly rational arguments, such as being too small, requiring too large an investment, being limited to the automotive sector, lacking human resources, etc. The main actions taken with these enterprises are to demystify what

they can expect to gain from digitisation and help them understand sources of waste and malfunctioning when it comes to productivity, sales, cost, quality, deadlines, etc. and develop actual action plans to bring them into a dynamic of progress. Still, the great majority of our SMEs are between these two extremes and wondering actively about the possibilities, steps to take, and returns on investment. The aim for this type of SMEs is to help them establish their organisational and competitiveness priorities through the opportunities that industry 4.0 offers.

How can the competitiveness cluster help its members on the international level? The MecaTech Competitiveness Cluster offers direct support that can range from organising exploratory missions to seeking out European financing. The range of actions is thus rather varied, but with the constant goal of helping our companies develop international projects. We also do considerable preparatory

The Factory 4.0 support project

Two years after the Factory 4.0 support project was launched, the following has already been learned: - Operational excellence remains a major, priority challenge. - Planning is a high hurdle to clear. Opening up to automation and robotization is a must. - Digitisation remains an unknown (the Cloud, Big Data, AR/VR, etc.). - Internal organizational issues and HR needs are underestimated.

The CRAMIC R&D project

The aim of CRAMIC is to develop a new technology for the rail tracks of cranes used to warehouse containers in international ports or to handle bulk materials in mines or ports. The work of these cranes, which until now was assumed to be static or cyclical, is becoming more and more dynamic because of increases in speed and loads, thereby increasing wear on the rail tracks. The resulting dynamic effects have become preponderant. They are poorly controlled and can no longer be overlooked in designing future facilities.

The project has three intertwined goals, as follows : (i) to control and quantify the impacts of these dynamic effects, which stem from multiple causes; (ii) to rescale and develop new rail track technologies based on the foregoing outcomes; and (iii) to equip the facilities with data acquisition systems in order to keep track of distortions, in view of longer-term maintenance.

https://www.polemecatech.be/en/projets/cramic/

work. It obviously is not very visible, but it benefits our members. For example, over the past five years we have worked a lot on the digital strand, that of digitising industry. Thanks to various European projects in which the MecaTech Cluster is a partner, we are now in a position to offer “Factory 4.0” diagnosis for our members, but also funding for their project ideas in the area of the industrial IoT. Thanks to these actions and contacts, we are able to give our members access to a vast industrial ecosystem in Europe.

Industry 4.0 is a key technological step that Wallonia must seize as an industrial redeployment opportunity. The MecaTech Competitiveness Cluster embarked on this path several years ago by financing several R&D projects as part of the region’s competitiveness clusters policy.

The MecaTech Cluster’s strategy is a three-pronged approach: - Demand side: integration of digital technology in products such as automobiles, medical devices, machines, and various types of plant. - Demand side: integration of digital technology in industrial processes in order to improve productivity and competitiveness in the various links of the added-value chain. - Supply side: development of enterprises’ digital capabilities in order to meet the demand.

During the first IOT4INDUSTRY call for projects, two first Walloon projects were selected. On the one hand the ICLOS project carried by the LASEA company, on the other hand the IOT4PM project carried by the B-Side company. During the second and last call for projects, five additional projects were selected out of the 9 submitted, i.e. 56% success rate for the Walloons. As a comparison for the whole of Europe, 16 projects were selected out of 96 submitted (17% success rate). Members of the MecaTech cluster are therefore present in almost one third of the projects labeled in Europe for this second call.

The SOLAR GNEXT project

In recent years, the emerging technologies for concentrated solar power (CSP) plants combine a central receptor located at the top of a 200 metre high tower and molten salt as the heat transfer fluid. The advantage of using molten salt to transfer the generated heat is that it can be stored at high temperatures, which turns it into a sort of heat energy reserve. Such storage enables the system to work without solar inputs for up to 17 hours, thereby allowing round-the-clock electricity generation.

This market is developing strongly, and thermal CSP is greatly threatened by the decreasing cost of and increased competition from the photovoltaic panel + battery solution. To remain competitive, the various players are seeking to improve the yields of their CSP plants and to develop the next generation of solar power tower systems. This means raising the temperature of the heat transfer fluid exiting the solar receptor from 565 to 730°C and, consequently, raising the temperature in the receptor tubes from 700 to 850°C.

The solar receptor is already the most critical element of the CSPP, given the high densities of the solar energy fluxes to collect and the high temperature variations associated with the diurnal/nocturnal cycles. Increasing the operating temperature is a new challenge that requires developing a new generation of solar receptors. The aim of this project is to study the materials and heat transfer fluids that can work under such extreme conditions and guarantee the requisite performance levels throughout the life of the CSPP.

https://www.polemecatech.be/en/projets/solar-gnext/

© MecaTech

The IOT4INDUSTRY project is funded by the European Commission under the call HORIZON 2020 INNOSUP 1. Wallonia is represented for the first time through the MecaTech cluster. This project will finance and implement forty prototypes and full-scale demonstrators integrating IoT, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity into the tools and means of production of European industrial companies wishing to digitize their processes. The project brings together European partners in strategic industrial sectors (automotive, aerospace, medical, energy, robotics...).

The two IoT4Industry calls together contribute € 515,000 in funding for the Walloon ecosystem. The aim is thus to match the “supply-side” enterprises’ capacities with the “demand-side” enterprises’ needs through various actions, project engineering and training programmes. This strategy has culminated with the creation of an assistance programme for Walloon enterprises (mainly SMEs) that consists of the following elements: - Making a diagnosis to allow the setting of action plans (Factory 4.0 – Interreg V) in order to meet the first challenge the companies must take up, namely, imagining and foreseeing how these technologies can be combined to transform the products, processes, and services that they offer. - Implementing appropriate training options (Factory 4.0 – Training) to master these technologies, which are often outside the companies’ core business, to enable the enterprise to create these new processes, products, and/or services. Developing or recruiting human resources with these new skills is a must. - Running a Digital/Industry 4.0 expert network to provide assistance and develop the necessary solutions and financing for proof-of-concept work and pilot projects (IOT4INDUSTRY – H2020, competitiveness clusters’ calls for projects, and other regional sources of aid).