FormPlanet project, coordinated by Eurecat, has been recognised as one of the finalists of the Standards+Innovation Awards 2021 in the project award category, selecting a European project that has successfully contributed to standardisation.
The Standards+Innovation Awards, organised by CEN-CENELEC, the European Committees for standardisation and for Electrotechnical Standardisation, acknowledge the important contribution of research and innovation to standardisation and celebrates the contributions of researchers, innovators and entrepreneurs to standardisation.
FormPlanet project is leading the creation of an industrial innovation platform at the European level that aims to increase and improve the productivity of the sheet metal forming industry through the implementation of new metal characterisation tests and new modelling approaches.
Standardisation activities in FormPlanet have been led by UNE, the Spanish Association for Standardisation, with the objective to increase the visibility and impact of the project, as well as to contribute to the acceptance and utilisation by the market of the developed solutions. Standardisation activities, in addition to allow greater dissemination, will contribute to generate confidence in future users of the FormPlanet platform thanks to the implementation of standardised methods during the provision of characterisation services.
“We have guided the consortium in the production of two CEN Workshop Agreements with the objective to standardise two novel testing methodologies that allow to characterise sheet metal properties and predict sheet metal part performance”, explains Javier López-Quiles Pastor, Project Manager from UNE.
The two CEN Workshop Agreements (CWAs) produced are the result of eight months of work by the members of the CEN Workshop: “Innovative testing in support of the sheet metal forming industry”, which was launched in December 2020, and constituted a successful collaboration between various European organisations which have joined forces to achieve a common goal. One of these documents describes a procedure for the determination of fracture toughness in thin metal sheets, while the other a test method for the measurement of hydrogen content in metallic materials using the HELIOS 4 HOT PROBE equipment.
“Eurecat has proven, both in FormPlanet and in other research and innovation projects, that standardisation is an effective tool to increase the impact of a project and ensure greater applicability of the solutions developed amongst users in the industry. Standardisation contributes to the exploitation and commercialization of the results obtained in an R&D project, acting as a bridge between research activities and the market”, states Begoña Casas, FormPlanet Technical Coordinator and researcher from Eurecat.
FormPlanet project was nominated by UNE, the Spanish Association for Standardisation. A total of 30 nominations distributed across the different awards categories were received by 13 different CEN-CENELEC members. In the project awards’ category the projects BMMRI.pl.project, COVR, the European Connected Factory Platform for Agile Manufacturing – EFPF, HEALINT/HEALINT4ALL, SEA-TITAN, PhoCa, SPIDIA4P and VET21001 were also nominated from other standardisation bodies.
CEN-CENELEC brings together the national standards agencies of 34 European countries and involves business federations, commercial and consumer organizations, environmental groups and other societal stakeholders.
