Repairing, remanufacturing and refurbishing high value metal components, such as turbine blades or moulds&dies is a crucial action to increase companies’ competitiveness and to move towards a more sustainable economy. Nowadays repairing operations on such parts are already performed using expensive and time consuming approaches, since the required operations are carried out on different machines. The key idea of RetroFix is to provide a retrofit kit for an existing milling machine enabling to perform repairing operations using an innovative additive manufacturing technology, based on arc welding. This way, all the repairing actions could be carried out in the same machine reducing the non-operative time. Besides the entire workflow will be automated, drastically reducing the manual intervention. Finally, the retrofit approach constitutes a low-cost solution for part repairing. Indeed, it will allow potential customer to access this innovative technology with a reduced investment. The developed product will create a new business opportunity for the project partners that will commercialize an innovative solution improving cost-effectiveness of the repairing operations.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement nº 721267.