Smart-Growth

The future of crystals is growing

Smart Growth offers AI enabled control of crystal growth via Cz process based on ZDM principles to improve crystal yield, reduce critical rare material and energy wastage in the manufacturing process benefitting both crystal manufacturers and downstream users.

Current State of Crystal Growth Industry

Characterized by hostile process conditions such as high contamination risks, long process times.
High use of both expensive rare earth materials and energy.
Presence of numerous difficult to-measure process parameters to be controlled.

Advances from an AI enhanced ZDM approach to crystal growing:

Development of advanced radiation and non-radiation based sensors to identify the state of the molten material and the furnace infrastructure.
Development of AI tool, based on digital process models as well as historic and inline data management, to understand the relationships between process parameters, crystal quality and its yield.
Digital Twin integration and development of Cyber Physical System for predictive control based on AI markers incorporating optimization from digital twinning.

Expected results from Smart-Growth:

Improved yield of crystal production.
Reduced energy consumption and material scrap produced.
Improved quality of grown crystal.

Location

This ambitious, multi-disciplinary project is being carried out by a consortium that forms an ideal inter-regional grouping taking into consideration SMEs who receive 70% of the grant, and partners that either originate from regions that have an interest in contributing to the proposed technology or have an interest in the results. The local eco-system layers being benefitted are:

Jena Optics Valley and Berlin – Brandenburg Optics community (Germany) from AI based manufacturing control in other types of photonics and component manufacturing and assembly.
Lombardy industrial manufacturing community (Italy) from AI based manufacturing control of other “hot objects”.
Bolzano information and communication centre (Italy) from multi-parametric sensor data flow and AI control for complex manufacturing equipment.
Sardinian photonic cluster (Italy) from process sensorics and AI control for sustainable crystal growth of Alexandrites and others.
Timisoara University crystal manufacturing and applications centre (Romania) from AI based crystal growth for other than Czochralski process.

MANUFACTURING SYNERGIES

The synergetic benefits of SMART-Growth project include a great potential to upscale and proliferate Industry 4.0 technologies for industrial adoption.
Relevant sensorics, data models and process control methodologies can be provided to other “hot object” manufacturing technologies such as hot embossing, food processing etc.
There is potential to improve sustainability of other “hot object” manufacturing by transplanting the usage of the developed process sensorics and AI-based control onto them.

SUSTAINABLE CRYSTAL GROWING

To achieve sustainable, reliable and cost-effective production via Czochralski method improving yield and energy consumption while also reducing raw material (especially rare earth) wastage.
This pilot will involve the development of process hardware, sensorics for monitoring and control and process optimization for the value chain of crystal manufacturing.
The pilot is foreseen to achieve beyond state-of-the-art progress in monitoring of process temperature and the usage of this data to build crystal growth models, AI based process control, Digital Twins and Cyber Physical Systems.

General Assembly in Milan
SMART-Growth Shines at CMCEE 2024
8th European Crystal Growth Conference in Warsaw
Live meeting at FILAR
ICAM - Advanced Environmental Research Institute

Funded by the European Union.

Views and opinions expressed are however those of the authors) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or I3 instrument. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.