Funding cycle 2018
The current funding period 2018 allows the funding of 8 research projects, which results are exclusively available to DMRC industrial companies. Some projects have emerged from previous projects so that new knowledge can be deepened.
Das Projekt DynAMiCS hat zum Gegenstand, ein Check-System für (1) allgemeine Potentiale, (2) Produkte und Dienstleistungen sowie (3) Geschäftsmodelle zu entwickeln. Ziel ist es, das DMRC zu befähigen, seine langjährigen Kompetenzen pragmatisch an Unternehmen weiterzuvermitteln. Im Rahmen dieses Projekts wird die fünfte Studie der Serie „Thinking Ahead the Future of Additive Manufacturing“ erscheinen.
In order to assure quality of SLM manufactured parts, a view into the production history of each layer might help to increase trust in this procedure and help to minimize post-process quality costs.
There is high market potential for the production of metal parts using Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies: In many applications, stainless steel (1.4404) with a good corrosion resistance is widely used. For example, in the field of passenger services or goods traffic with trains, or the automotive industry there are many applications, which can be produced cost-efficient by AM, e.g. brackets, hydraulic components. For serial production, deep knowledge on the robustness of part properties against variation of powder characteristics is required.
Still there is a challenge to envisage future evolutions of AM and to provide valid fundaments for strategic decisions within enterprises and business units. Requests indicate that the five public DMRC studies still attract significant interest for the DMRC. As an “Industrial Research Base”, the DMRC needs to act as an influencer in the community, to focus ambitions towards key research areas, to advance quickly but sound in all of these areas and strengthen strategic decisions of partners. DMRC needs to actively drive growth (regarding academic chairs and industry partners), community interactions (EU, AM Platform, IMS, VDI, VDMA, Bitkom) and relationships (based on DynAMiCS results) with a clear and continuously updated focus.
Within the last DMRC Project “LS Polyamide for High Temperature Applications – Processing and Properties of PA613” it could be shown that the new LS material PA613, delivered by Evonik, shows good processability on the regular “low temperature” LS EOS P396 machine and mechanical part properties are about 25 % better than the ones of polyamide 12 build parts. However, beside higher strength, higher temperature resistance is required in advanced applications like electronics or automotive industry. The temperature resistance in addition to other advanced short term material properties will be investigated within this project. As PA613 is not known in conventional manufacturing it is important to classify the material within the range of engineering plastics to become a new high performance material in industry, for this purpose more information about part properties have to be generated.
Not many high performance polymers are available for AM processes. A widespread manufacturing process is the Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM). In the FDM process, the semi-finished product is a thermoplastic polymer filament. In a FDM head the filament is melted and forced through a heated nozzle. A layer is generated by the movement of the head along the x- and y-axis and the simultaneous extrusion of melted polymer. By the deposition of various layers, three-dimensional components can be produced.
The superior motivation of the project “qualification of serial production by laser sintering” is to enhance laser sintering more and more to a serial production process. LS has many factors which can influence the process like shown in figure 1. It is essential for a serial production process to achieve high accuracy as well as reproducibility and actually there is no general qualification procedure and quality management concept for LS serial production to handle these influencing factors in a common way. Presently, the users of LS machines, and in particular unexperienced users, need to develop their own internal qualification procedure to decide whether a serial production of a concrete part is possible or not and they also need to develop a quality management concept to build quality parts for their customers continuously.