ManuCloud completes LED solar hybrid manufacturing
The manufacturing of individually designed organic light-emitting diodes and solar cells and their combination can be realized in the near future. After three years the project ManuCloud (distributed Cloud product specification and supply chain manufacturing execution infrastructure), which was funded by the European Union, now successfully completed its work. As result the project partners Heliatek, Fraunhofer COMEDD, Tridonic Dresden and GSS Gebäude-Solarsysteme GmbH presented a demonstrator of a façade module, which combines the OLED- and OPV-technology. The objective of the ManuCloud project was the development of a service-oriented IT environment as basis for the next level of manufacturing networks by enabling production-related inter-enterprise integration down to shop floor level. Industrial relevance was guaranteed by involving industrial partners from the organic photovoltaic, organic lighting and automotive supply industries.
The transition from mass production to personalized, customer-oriented and eco-efficient manufacturing is considered to be a promising approach to improve and secure the competitiveness of the European manufacturing industries in the future, which constitute an important pillar of the European prosperity. One precondition for this transition is the availability of agile IT systems supporting this level of flexibility on the production network layer on the one hand and on the factory and process levels on the other hand. The European Union´s Seventh Framework Programme funded project ManuCloud was setup in 2010 with the mission to investigate the production IT-related aspects for this transition and to develop and evaluate a suitable IT infrastructure to provide better support for on-demand manufacturing scenarios, taking multiple tiers of the value chain into account. On this path, the ManuCloud members implemented the vision of a cloud-like architecture concept, providing users with the ability to utilize the manufacturing capabilities of configurable, virtualized production networks, based on cloud-enabled, federated factories, supported by a set of software-as-a-service applications.
Two seminal technologies have been selected to demonstrate the application context for the ManuCloud concept: The organic photovoltaic (OPV) and the organic LED (OLED) technology. Each of them is driven by specific market needs. Both markets are currently in an early stage. However, market research predicts a multibillion dollar market for these products already in a few years. Due to the unique properties of large-area light generation and energy harvesting, coming with special features like adjustable colors, transparency and a thin and lightweight structure, OLAE (organic and large area electronic) technologies are expected to generate numerous new applications with a substantial share being customized solutions. The project has setup and evaluated a manufacturing cloud infrastructure for customized organic lighting and solar cell solutions.
