RUSH AI

Revolutionary Ultra-Fast System for Hot-stamping of light weight structural vehicle components with Artificial Intelligence quality control monitoring

The automotive market is driven by many safety performance assessment programs. After safety, less CO2 emissions and reduced production costs are priorities for OEMs that want to strengthen their competitive advantage while meeting the industry’s diverse regulations. Therefore, reducing the weight of a vehicle’s structural components (also called Body-in-White or BIW) in a cost-effective way and without jeopardising the security of passengers has been one of the OEMs main targets in the last decades.

The RUSH AI project is an ultra-fast system for the hot stamping of components of light structural vehicles with quality control monitoring of artificial intelligence (AI), which is the result of more than a decade of intensive research in the framework of multilateral internal, national and international projects.

The main advantages of  RUSH AI are:

• Increases productivity by a factor of 4, as it reduces the total manufacturing cycle time of an average hot stamping component by more than 70%
• Incorporates a hydraulic press solution to reach an automation total cycle time of 4.0-6.0 seconds.
• Includes the revolutionary “sweating die” process, inspired by human perspiration, also refered to as 0.5 TECH, as it allows to reach a “Closed Die time” of only 0.5 seconds.
• It is applicable to Ultra high strength steels (&gt; 2,000MPa) and complex geometries. Therefore, with <span style=”color: #800000;”><strong>RUSH AI</strong></span> other components and types of BIW blanks can be manufactured on the same line, unlocking the market uptake of newly developed UHSS.
• It incorporates an online quality control system, intelligent and self-correcting, powered by physical and virtual temperature sensors and connected to a Big Data / Artificial Intelligence engine. This system ensures that each manufactured component is inspected individually. It is an extremely precise quality control procedure, online and in real time. It will represent a step beyond Industry 4.0.

Due to the lower rejection of the components, the decrease in weight and the shorter cycle times, RUSH AI generates savings of 70-80% of OPEX.

The consortium formed to carry out RUSH AI consists of 4 partners from 3 EU countries:

1. CRF: RICERCHE FIAT SCPA CENTER – Italy
2. ROVALMA, S.A- Spain
3. Gigant Italia S.r.L. – Italy
4. DataStories International – Belgium

With the intention of obtaining help to finance it, the consortium led by CRF, together with <em><strong>Aristos Innovation Consulting</strong></em>, applied to the October 2018 call of the FTI program of the H2020 and we are very proud to announce that they have obtained the necessary grant to carry out their project, obtaining a score of 13.60 in the results of the evaluation.

We are glad to have been part of this success of the consortium of companies that form RUSH AI, and we wish our clients the best of luck in the development of this project, which is so important for automotive safety.