CHARM - Challenging Environments Tolerant Smart Systems for IoT and AI, subproject: reliability investigations and virtual prototyping for electronics under harsh operating conditions
Digitalisation is the most important prerequisite for enhancing the competitiveness of European manufacturing industries. However, the possibilities to implement digitalisation and use the Internet of Things (IoT) can be limited by the harsh environmental conditions of manufacturing processes and end-use environments. The CHARM project addresses challenges to solve this problem by developing ECS (Electronic Components and Systems) technologies that tolerate harsh industrial environments. The project focuses on real industrial challenges from different types of end-use industries. The synergies and impacts arise from commonalities of the technology solutions that serve different applications and industries. The use cases in CHARM comprise six different industry sectors. Large-scale enterprises, each of them a market leader in its sector but almost all of them new to the ECSEL ecosystem, bring their innovative ideas in here: Mining (Sandvik Mining and Construction Oy, FI), Paper Manufacturing (Valmet Technologies Oy, FI), Mechanical Engineering (Tornos SA, CH), Photovoltaic Manufacturing Line (Applied Materials Italia SRL, IT), Environmental Technology - Nuclear Power Plant Maintenance and Decommissioning (ÚJV Řež a.s., CZ), and Digital Printing (Océ-Technologies B.V., NL). Planned demonstrators incorporate these major players into the European ECS value chains and demonstrate capabilities that serve needs of the manufacturing industry as a whole. Technologies to be developed include novel multi-gas sensors, robust high-temperature and pressure sensors, flexible sensors for paper machine rolls, wireless energy transfer systems, connectivity solutions for rotating parts, advanced vision systems and enablers for autonomous drives. The project consortium includes a total of 12 SMEs, 14 LEs and 12 RTOs and covers the industrial value chains from simulations, sensors and components, packaging, integration and reliability to connectivity, cloud and cybersecurity solutions. Further information and a video can be found at https://charm-ecsel.eu/.
The work at ZfM focuses on modelling and simulation with the aim of ensuring the functionality, manufacturability and reliability of the demonstrators in harsh environments. The particular challenge of sensor systems for harsh environmental conditions consists of avoiding multimodal failure modes (thermal, thermomechanical, electrical, environmental, corrosive, radiation, etc.). On the one hand, the packaging architecture needs to provide reliable protection against the harsh environmental conditions and, on the other hand, enables all necessary interactions with the environment. Virtual prototyping based on finite element simulations (FEM) will be used to ensure the reliability, testability and manufacturability of the new designs a priori, without having to carry out extensive hardware tests. For this purpose, the design of the demonstrators is considered, starting with the circuit and moving to the component, the module up to the system level. In the context of virtual prototyping, numerical models are used to simulate the real structures and their behaviour under operating and test conditions realistically. The aim is to generate realistic digital twins that take into account actual material properties and actual loading conditions from the operating case or in the reliability tests. In order to validate the virtual prototypes, the predictions derived from the simulation based on the 'digital twins' are compared with the reliability results obtained in experimental tests or in actual field tests on the physical samples. The objective is the further development of the methodology of combined simulation and experimental tests consequently.
