Laser Lines (Banbury, England), an established reseller of 3D printers and materials, has become the preferred supplier for the University of Birmingham’s project, Advanced Manufacturing Technologies to Create, Activate and Automate (AMTECAA). This project supports subject matter experts (SMEs) in the West Midlands region looking to apply advanced manufacturing technologies across a wide range of manufacturing sectors, including automotive, aerospace, oil and gas, electronic, and food & drink. It also has a dedicated resource focused on the particular requirements of the healthcare sector.
AMTECAA is a program supported by the Smart Factory Hub project, which is partly funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). This supports manufacturing SMEs with innovation, improvements in productivity, and competitiveness by providing them access to the latest advances in advanced manufacturing technologies, digital manufacturing, automation, smart factory, and Industry 4.0 expertise.
AMTECAA will run until June 2023, and will support SMEs in four Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) areas: Greater Birmingham & Solihull, Coventry & Warwickshire, Black Country, and Stoke & Staffordshire. It will provide access to equipment that uses cutting-edge technologies. Laser Lines is one of the strategic partners supporting this initiative and has installed a Desktop Metal Shop System powerful enough to produce one batch of metal parts every 6-10 hours. It is the first installation of its kind in the UK.
The goal is that SMEs will be able to develop new products and processes, while improving existing ones, by deploying a range of state-of-the-art additive, subtractive, and hybrid technologies. They will also be able to automate processes and operations by deploying robotics and other Industry 4.0 technologies to production lines.
There are seven technology areas covered by AMTECAA: metal additive manufacturing, subtractive manufacturing, hybrid manufacturing, laser processing, robotics and automation, plasma processing, and healthcare technologies.
Read more about AMTECAA at http://bit.ly/AMTECAA.