ALDAKIN’s Breakthrough Project Earns CECIMO MTI Innovation Award

San Sebastian, Spain – ALDAKIN, an AFM Cluster—the organization that represents advanced and digital manufacturing in Spain—associate company, was recognized by the European Association of Manufacturing Technologies (CECIMO) for its ‘exceptional’ project called ‘Elimination of human exposure to potentially carcinogenic dusts and increase of robot performance in the machining of composite parts’.

This is not the only milestone achieved by a company with branches in Aizoáin (Navarra), VitoriaGasteiz (Álava), and Andoáin (Gipuzkoa), which expects to close this year with a turnover of € 15.5 million, two more than the previous year.

The Navarre firm beat the two finalists who accompanied it on the honor roll: the German company Trumpf, the largest machine tool manufacturer in the world, and its compatriot, the Fraunhofer Institute. Ibai Inziarte, Innovation Director, Aldakin, was in charge of collecting the first prize, and at the award ceremony held in Brussels, the Navarre delegation was accompanied by Sergio Pérez, Director General of External Action, Government of Navarre.

The MTI Innovation Award is a recently created prize that seeks to reward the best innovations in the machine tool sector. In this first edition, more than 30 projects were submitted, of which a panel of international experts selected three as finalists. The CECIMO MTI awards are, according to the organization, ‘an important step forward for the industry and lay the groundwork for recognizing pioneering contributions within the machine tool sector’.

In that sense, “European industry is at the forefront of sustainable manufacturing, and the Commission is committed to supporting the adoption of clean technologies and advanced manufacturing solutions. CECIMO is a great opportunity to see European innovators at work,” commented Kerstin Jorna, Director General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs, European Commission, during the ceremony. The final pitted the German Fraunhofer Institute (Germany’s leading research institution), Trumpf (the world’s largest machine tool manufacturer), and Aldakin against each other.

The winning project consists of a machining robot, whose objective for machining composites is to replace conventional milling machines with a safe, precise, and cost-effective robot. The robot is capable of vacuuming 98 percent of the dust generated and achieving an impressive accuracy of +/- 0.15 mm. This level of accuracy is three times higher than conventional robots and exceeds the tolerance requirements of the aerospace industry, which is less than +/- 0.25 mm.

Image Source: AFM Cluster