An outstanding number of technicians and specialists from automotive and aeronautical companies, along with a significant representation of Basque scientific and technological agents, took part in this workshop held in the facilities of the IK4-AZTERLAN Metallurgy Research Centre.
This meeting belongs to the B-SAREA initiative of the Provincial Council of Bizkaia, which aims to enhance the collaboration between companies and the various public-private agents that belong to the network. The event was organised by the Competitiveness Agency of Durangaldea and HEGAN Aeronautical Cluster, as active members of B-SAREA.
The conference “Technological and cooperation challenges within aeronautical and automotive sectors” has brought together experts from more than 50 companies and organizations to share their insights on strategic innovation areas that concern to these dynamic and demanding industries
Identifying challenges through the experiences of first row companies
After the corresponding welcome by Mr. José Javier González, coordinator of the Competitiveness Agency of Durangaldea, the technical meeting began with the participation of Mrs. Ana Villate, director of HEGAN Basque Aerospace Cluster, and Mr. Juan Ramis, director of innovation at Arania, S.A., who presented the main characteristics and challenges of their respective organizations, together with the main technological challenges to be addressed in the short and medium term.
Later, Mrs. Sara Concha Navarro and Mrs. Alba Gavilán, members of the Innovation and Smart Factory Teams from SEAT, highlighted the importance of knowledge management inside their organization and the transition towards models of open innovation in production. Navarro and Gavilán identified these two areas as priority focuses on the strategy of this vehicle manufacturer. To this end, they presented several experiences on collaborative robotics and additive manufacturing put in practice in the SEAT assembly plant of Martorell.
Mr. Iker Zamakona, Machining Operations Technician from the company ITP AERO, shared with the attendees of the Conference the trends and the main needs in the manufacturing operations of aeronautical components, looking forward to the engines of the future.
Mr. Iñigo Ezquerra, director of the Aeronautics, Space and Defence division of Altran, focused his presentation on innovation challenges within different reference aeronautical projects from this important industrial engineering company.
Coming into the field of metallic materials, Mr. Fernando Santos, researcher from IK4-AZTERLAN Technology Centre, addressed some clear improvement opportunities within the exploitation and optimisation of metallic materials in design, as well as in the improvement of mechanical properties.
The workshop ended with a roundtable that counted on the participation of all the speakers to discuss the different points of view on the main challenges and concerns identified: technological challenges associated to the whole value chain of both sectors, the development and management of talent to respond to future jobs and company models, the development of data predictive analysis and machine learning technologies and the management of knowledge inside the organisations. Also, the need to generate more transverse ways of communication and knowledge transfer that could be exploited by the Basque industry was highlighted.
One of the speakers at the technical event
