Robust Additive Manufacturing of Components with Thin Walls and Narrow Channels

Robust Additive Manufacturing of Components with Thin Walls and Narrow Channels

Project time: 2021 – 2024

Budget: 9 850 000 kronor

Assessing the Robustness of the Laser Powder Bed Fusion Process

There is a delicate interplay between process flexibility and process robustness. As the flexibility of a manufacturing process increases, the identification and control of the sources of variation become more challenging. This project investigates the robustness of the Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF) process with a focus on the integrity of thin walls and narrow channels produced with this technology. For parts where the performance is heavily reliant on thin walls (e.g., for heat transfer) and narrow channels (e.g., for fluid transfer) a robust LPBF production that can guarantee fluid tightness, high mechanical strength and dimensional accuracy is critical. Today, the uncertainty about LPBF process robustness is a major obstacle for industrialization of this technology for serial production.

A full-scale robustness study is costly and requires extensive empirical testing. The objective of this project is to develop a new methodology for evaluation of process robustness which is cost-effective and less test intensive. This new methodology is based on predictions from LPBF process simulation and correlations with the layer-by-layer data generated with the process monitoring tools.

The project consortium constructs the complete production chain. The team includes two end-users (Alfa Laval and Siemens), and three key technology providers in the field of process simulation (MSC Software), production systems (SLM Solutions) and post processing (RENA). A material provider (Höganäs) and two service providers with expertise in the field of quality assurance (Nikon), and product design and process simulation (Etteplan) will support the project. The industrial team will work closely with RISE IVF and Chalmers University of Technology.

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