Innovation in plastics: trends and new technologies in the plastics and automotive industry

On Monday the 16th of October, the HiLASE Centre hosted a Brain4Industry consortium (which HiLASE Centre is a part of) roundtable on Innovation in plastics production. Together with David Hausner, chairman of the Plastics Cluster, and Libor Dobeš, head of Autocluster, we looked for trends and possibilities of incorporating new technologies in the plastics and automotive industry.

“There is a clear trend towards digitisation, automation and robotics in our industry. Hand in hand with this, we can observe a great pressure on the speed of new product development, and also on sustainability”, says Libor Dobeš.

Representing HiLASE Centre, Petr Hauschwitz and Jan Brajer presented the possibilities of using laser technologies for the development and processing of plastics, whether it is texturing, micromachining or surface functionalization.

Ondřej Kurkin and Martin Gášek from CARDAM explained how digitisation can help with the set-up of production processes and how additive technologies and topological optimisation can be used in toolmaking. Jakub Krupa (Institute of Physics) focused on prototyping as a tool for optimizing and accelerating the development of new products.

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