As part of the drive to promote jobs and growth in the European photonics industry, Pulsate was set up in 2020 with a grant of 7.9 million euros under the EU’s Horizon 2020 program as a four-year project to promote and facilitate the adoption of LBAAM technologies.

These play an important role in furthering digital production and offer important advantages to the companies that adopt them. However, barriers such as high investment costs, complex technology and system integration and lack of awareness hinder their adoption by SMEs. Pulsate aims to mitigate these barriers by creating a Europe-wide network to enable and encourage SMEs to participate in LBAAM innovation and become more globally competitive.

Pulsate’s first Technology Transfer Experiments (TTE) open call closed on 29 April 2021, with 35 proposals submitted from 16 different European countries. The proposals have since gone through a rigorous, multistep selection process to identify the best teams and experiments able to demonstrate an effective adoption of LBAAM laser solutions by end-users.

They were first evaluated by external experts from the Laser industry, who selected 25 that passed the required threshold. These were then considered by the Pulsate selection committee, who selected the best 18 candidates to attend the ‘jury day’, where each team presented their proposal and answered questions from the jury.

Finally, after passing a formal review, the jury selected the 10 best proposals to receive up to 150,000 euros in funds and join a the 13-month support programme that includes technical support from Pulsate’s technical partners, business mentoring from FundingBox, media exposure, and access to private and public funding.

The main objectives of the experiments are to lower entry barriers for SMEs wishing to participate in LBAAM by developing innovative laser-based equipment, processes, ancillary equipment, and software; finding solutions particularly adapted to flexible production environments, typical in SMEs; and developing digital tools to improve productivity, flexibility, and traceability.

Submissions came from all over Europe and the winning experiments address topics like additive manufacturing, laser cladding, laser structuring and laser welding. The proposal from Pres-X (Italy) and Cailabs (France) will be addressed in a technical article in the upcoming issue 5/2021 of PhotonicsViews.
 
The next Technology Transfer open call will launch in July 2022. On top of that, Pulsate will launch adopters open calls in Q1 2022 and Q2 2023 for SMEs that are interested in technical and economic feasibility assessment for the implementation of LBAAM technologies into their processes. Interested applicants are invited to sign up to receive a news when the future opportunity will be launched: pulsate-adopters.fundingbox.com.

Further reading: JePPIX and PULSATE Pilot Lines Open Calls, WileyIndustryNews.com, 10 March 2021