Virtual Reality and 3D Imaging to Support Collaborative Decision Making for Adaptation of Long-Life Assets

European companies of today are involved in many stages of the product life cycle. There is a trend towards the view of their business as a complex industrial product-service system (IPSS). This trend shifts the business focus from a traditional product oriented one to a function oriented one. With the function in focus, the seller shares the responsibility of for example maintenance of the product with the buyer. As such IPSS has been praised for supporting sustainable practices. This shift in focus also promotes longevity of products and promotes life extending work on the products such as adaptation and upgrades. Staying competitive requires continuous improvement of manufacturing and services to make them more flexible and adaptive to external changes. The adaptation itself needs to be performed efficiently without disrupting ongoing operations and needs to result in an acceptable after state. Virtual planning models are a key technology to enable planning and design of the future operations in parallel with ongoing operations. This chapter presents an approach to combine digitalization and virtual reality (VR) technologies to create the next generation of virtual planning environments. Through incorporating digitalization techniques such as 3D imaging, the models will reach a new level of fidelity and realism which in turn makes them accessible to a broader group of users and stakeholders. Increased accessibility facilitates a collaborative decision making process that invites and includes cross functional teams. Through such involvement, a broader range of experts, their skills, operational and tacit knowledge can be leveraged towards better planning of the upgrade process. This promises to shorte

The effect of contamination on the metallurgy of commercially pure titanium welded with a pulsed laser beam

Commercially pure titanium components in medical devices are commonly joined using pulsed laser welding because of the precision, low heat input and low thermal distortion it affords. Despite the importance of this technique in structural components, such as dental prosthesis, there is still a limited understanding of the factors which affect the weld metallurgy. In this study the effect of O, N and Fe on the weld metallurgy, as both external and bulk contaminants, is investigated. The results indicate that Fe has the most pronounced effect on the nature of the allotropic β-α phase transformation, suppressing the massive transformation and encouraging the formation of martensite. This finding is in contrast to the effects of O and N which are usually the subject of studies reported in the literature. Whilst O and N do cause more hardening than Fe, this seems to be mainly through more pronounced solid solution strengthening. The study also demonstrates the inadequacy of relying on ASTM grades to predict weld properties and the need to adequately characterise the base alloys. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC