CHUTUNG, HSINCHU, TAIWAN – Taiwan’s leading research institute for electronics manufacturing has developed a self-guided system for additive manufacturing that is said to improve material utilization while slashing carbon emissions.
SAMMCERS (self-guided additive manufacturing for minimum carbon emission with roll-to-roll-production system) features real-time self-guidance mechanisms based on an interactive cloud system. Developed by the Industrial Technology Research Institute of Taiwan, the system is said to reduce overall carbon emissions in mass production of most key components by more than 50%. It is customized for each application and features high-precision roll-to-roll additive manufacturing, fast sensors for predictive manufacturing, and interactive cloud systems. By means of real-time customized production in product designs and quantities, SAMMCERS reduces downgraded products to nearly zero, ITRI says. It also includes a self-guidance system that corrects production in real-time to maximize production yields and minimize work in process (WIP). The direct printing machine replaces seven machines in the conventional roll-to-roll process. Its low power consumption with direct-printing technology replaces conventional deposition-lithography-etching processes, which consume enormous amounts of electricity.
This improves material utilization from below 10% to more than 90% with direct printing.
Since SAMMCERS masters the fundamentals of roll-to-roll operation and improves production of touch panels, it has the potential to be widely deployed in industries such as consumer electronics, biosensors, flexible circuit boards, lighting, solar cell energy, and optical film, ITRI added.
“Increasingly intense competition in industry in recent years has forced manufacturers to spare no effort in considering smart manufacturing processes to boost yields, said Linda Liou, division director of ITRI’s Electronic and Optoelectronic System Research Laboratories. “ITRI has developed SAMMCERS to address this trend. SAMMCERS reduces the number of defective products, which enables manufacturers to achieve low-carbon manufacturing goals, with emissions estimated to be cut by 50%, thereby creating a more eco-friendly factory.”
The basic idea of a roll-to-roll production line is to provide a substrate that is continuously fed from the beginning of the line. The continuous substrate serves as the carrier and allows for the successive aggregation of product elements to finally become a continuous array of components; then, products can be collected at the end of the line. With the help of an array of ultra-fast sensors, meticulous processing conditions on the rolls can be monitored in real-time and relayed to backend systems via cloud computing for quick decisions on immediate adjustments. This enables real-time self-learning capabilities in the entire production system. The outcome is an improvement in overall production efficiency, and translates directly into reduced carbon emission. SAMMCERS’s additive mass production techniques significantly increase raw material usage up to 95%, compared to 5% in conventional sheet-to-sheet (S2S) lithography process.
OLED lighting production is another critical implementation of SAMMCERS, which minimizes wasted production by automatically guiding itself for consecutive batches to optimize the outcomes of each batch of products. A time series operates on the pilot line to prevent machine failure. It consists of alarm prediction, failure time estimation by machine learning and a self-guidance mechanism. For example, before the real OLED light source chamber excessive temperature alarm occurs, SAMMCERS can use previous patterns to predict subsequent temperature trends. It can divide the pattern into different time points to predict the alarm before it actually occurs, and allow preventative action.
SAMMCERS is available for licensing from ITRI.
