Chris Liebold
Annika MehlisBy optimizing the manufacturing process for chrome coatings, the Technische Universität Ilmenau is enabling sanitary fittings that are of a higher quality, more environmentally friendly and more economical than those produced to date. With the help of artificial intelligence and digital simulations, material and product development is to be made more efficient, thus drastically reducing the development times for industrial products. The DigiChrom project, which has just been launched and involves 11 research institutions and industrial companies, is set to run for three years and is being funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research with 3.2 million euros, of which TU Ilmenau is receiving 381,000 euros.
Electroplated chrome layers are used in the decorative sanitary sector, for example for taps or shower heads, but also for functional products in industry, for example in automotive engineering, in the steel industry and in mechanical engineering. Until now, all of these products have used materials that have been classified as "substances of very high concern" under the EU's REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals) regulation due to their toxicological and environmentally hazardous properties. The industry was obliged to conduct research into substitute processes and materials. Although harmless materials already exist, they are not yet competitive: Their color does not remain constant over time, they are not as resistant to corrosion and they wear out faster than the chromium coatings currently used. In addition, even the smallest changes during the manufacturing process can lead to undesirable properties of the material.
Annika MehlisDeveloping and producing materials that comply with legal requirements and are also suitable for industrial use and therefore competitive is a complicated and lengthy process. Until now, the trial-and-error principle has usually been used to optimize an electroplated layer: Production parameters are changed until a satisfactory solution is found - and that takes time.
With the large-scale research project DigiChrom ["Digital tools for improving electroplated layers using the example of chromium(III)-based processes"] initiated by TU Ilmenau, digitalized materials research is replacing the intuitive and unsystematic experimental methods used to date. Eleven partners from research and industry under the leadership of Hansgrohe, the leading German manufacturer of sanitary products, want to make the development and production of new materials and products that are harmless to health more efficient. The main task of the team of scientists from the Group of Electrochemistry and Electroplating at TU Ilmenau is to systematically record experimentally obtained data, combine it with data from digital simulations and enhance it with metadata. The generation of accurate, reproducible and complete data sets, which will later be used to "feed" the artificial intelligence, the machine learning, is a highly challenging task. Such a large amount of data is required that over 1000 experiments have to be carried out. If the DigiChrom project is successful, the industry will have a much larger amount of data at its disposal, which will drastically speed up the development and manufacture of its products.
In the run-up to the DigiChrom project, the TU Ilmenau, together with the Hansgrohe company, has already made significant progress by using the latest scientific methods such asX-ray fluorescence analysis and scanning electron microscopy to achieve outstanding results in the optical properties such as gloss and color value of the decorative layers of sanitary products. Prof. Andreas Bund, Head of the Group of Electrochemistry and Electroplating Technology and initiator of the project, is therefore convinced of the new possibilities of digitized materials research: "Our aim is to reduce the fluctuations that occur in the manufacturing process in terms of color and gloss by 75 percent, to double the abrasion resistance of the coatings and even to halve the costs. If we are successful, the results of the DigiChrom project will flow directly into industrial applications. And then we will also transfer the new method developed for chrome coatings to processes for other materials."