Abstract

Composites are still playing an important role in the strategic agendas of industries associated with the transport sector, such as the shipbuilding industry. This is mainly because composites are a key element in lightening structures due to their elevated strength-to-weight characteristics, excellent corrosion resistance and low maintenance costs. However, the production capacity in the number of Fibre Reinforced Polymer (FRP) ships nowadays is not achieving its full potential due to high total production costs. Thus, to maintain or even expand the competitive position of the EU shipbuilding industry it is essential to improve, optimize and automate the production processes for FRP parts.

The European Project Fibre4Yards (This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101006860) addresses this challenge through the implementation of the Shipyard 4.0 concept and applying innovative FRP manufacturing technologies to the shipbuilding industry such as: curved pultruded profiles, automated fibre placement (ATP), adaptive moulds, additive manufacturing, and hot stamping.

This work proves that during the adaptation process of certain manufacturing technologies to a new market, the decision-making stage must follow some specific steps: from the first analysis of the technical feasibility and the perception of the market of each technology, to the final measurements of the achieved improvements. Therefore, in this paper, implementation guidelines on adapting new composite manufacturing processes to the shipbuilding industry are presented, based on their evolution from the initial state to the final improvements.