Lighted-up houses, delicious smell of cookies and bright children’s eyes show that Christmas is not far away and the year 2021 is coming to an end. While there is still a pandemic out there, we consciously decided to focus on the positives with this article – the things we are grateful for. It’s time to review the highlights of the past 12 months and to say thank you.

Our technical teams achieved a lot in this past year. Together with our suppliers, we’ve built two new SAMBA systems with brand-new features. The system for NIAR has already been shipped and is on its way to the US. The other SAMBA system for an European aerospace customer will be finalized until the end of this year. We also installed a SAMBA Step R&D system at University of Augsburg earlier in 2021. Furthermore, the team continued working on our pressure vessel solution and we published a case study explaining our approach. We also started the R&D collaboration project MAI ACoSaLUS: Together with several industry and R&D partners, we’re aiming to speed up the net lay-up speed for composite sandwich structures by factor 7-10.

Meanwhile, our software team added a lot of new features and improvements in ARTIST STUDIO. Beginning of this year, we introduced thickness plots making it easier for engineers to visualize laminate thickness directly within ARTIST STUDIO, which leads to improved laminate design. The team is working further on a better support for thick laminates, in particular taking the thickness of lower layers of the laminate into account when designing the next layer of patches. The variable patch length is a new feature which allows to vary the patch length throughout the laminate. It is now possible to balance production speed with the quality of the laminate and the design-induced scrap rate, for example by better aligning patch orientation with curved load paths or surface shapes. In MOTION ARTIST, the team realized the first implementation of a SAMBA system with two cooperating 6-axis robots, allowing for production of parts which require the flexibility of movements from both robots. Also noteworthy are the general improvements for ARTIST STUDIO: more user friendly and intuitive, and faster algorithms, for example for patch-generation.

As a company, we continued to develop and welcomed GFM GmbH, an Austria-based high-tech machinery manufacturer, as new partner and shareholder in July. This partnership creates new opportunities to empower manufacturers to build complex composites in high volume and quality. About the same time, Dr. Florian Lenz joined our Management Team as Technical Director and Co-Founder Felix Michl transitioned out of this operational and into an advisory role for Cevotec. We also grew our commercial team and welcomed Henriette Morgenstern in her role as Technical Marketing & Business Development Manager.

To stay on course as one team while continuing to grow, we strengthened our cevoCulture and defined core values. beCEVO means for us to be curious, exceed expectations, value each other and to share one passion. We also affirmed our mission: “Enabling manufacturers to produce complex composites in high volume and superior quality!”. And on route to establish FPP as a global composite processing standard, now the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia lists Fiber Patch Placement since February.

We’d like to close this review with a big THANK YOU to all of you, our customers, business partners, and supporters for your trust in our work here at Cevotec. We already look forward to continuing the collaboration in 2022!

Merry Christmas from the entire cevoTeam!

About Cevotec:

Munich-based automation specialist Cevotec offers one of the world’s most advanced production systems for complex fiber composites. At the intersection of composites, mechanical engineering and software, Cevotec develops production systems and software based on Fiber Patch Placement (FPP) technology: SAMBA and ARTIST STUDIO. The production systems enable the automated lay-up of carbon fiber, glass fibers, adhesive films and other technical fibers on complex 3D geometries. Manufacturers use FPP technology to produce e.g. multi-material aerostructures, composite pressure vessel reinforcements, and other high-performance components in a quality-controlled, fully automated process, which enables them to realize cost & cycle time savings of 20%-60% when switching from conventional processes to Fiber Patch Placement.