Mission "Design for Additive" 🎙️

100% 𝐀𝐝𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞: 🚀

For me, this is the holy grail of components. The customer has been working intensively with additive manufacturing over the past few years and requests an additively manufactured part for production. You can start right away with job preparation - aligning the part directly in the pre-defined orientation - and then focus directly on optimizing the finishing processes. Often you are not alone, and a real price rally begins among the part manufacturers, in which multi-laser exposure, optimization of process parameters and the entire process chain are analyzed down to the last detail in order to ultimately deliver the best possible price to the customer.

From my point of view, this is the best case scenario - and it is also a lot of fun!

𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐥𝐚𝐫 𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐚𝐜𝐡 - 𝐚𝐝𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐚𝐬 𝐚 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐦 𝐬𝐨𝐥𝐯𝐞𝐫: 🧠

The customer is becoming aware of additive manufacturing out of a sense of necessity. Extremely long delivery times, high utilization of the production line to manufacture the conventional component that is actually needed - only additive manufacturing can help. A customer urgently needs a component that can only be optimized for additive manufacturing on a small scale, because the functionality should not be changed and the costs should be as close as possible to the machining process. This is a familiar picture, and one that some AM experts will have experienced. The part is supported and the processes are optimized down to the last decimal point in order to deliver a competitive price. But is that enough to make the decision to go with additive manufacturing? No, it's not - because it only takes into account the manufacturing cost and not the total cost of ownership. So customers find a way to work with the processes they know!

A lot of effort with a low success rate!

𝐀𝐝𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐞𝐬 𝐧𝐨 𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐞: 👎

In the last scenario, the customer comes up with "penny parts" and wants them printed. It seems like a kind of innovative printing story "Inno Printing" instead of the well-known "Green Washing" in companies. After all, they've heard a lot about additive manufacturing, which is supposed to do everything and solve all manufacturing problems.

"𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘢𝘯 𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘮𝘱𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘥𝘪𝘱 𝘢 𝘵𝘰𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘭𝘥 𝘸𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘳, 𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘬𝘴."

As an AM expert, it's difficult to build trust and convince the customer of your technology. A short proposal is usually followed by the use case being taken off the table and additive manufacturing being put back on the shelf.

This is why the focus needs to be on the basics, such as design with a DfAM approach, to really accelerate additive manufacturing. We no longer need bubbles telling us that this technology can do everything, but use cases with additive thinking customers!

What do you think about it?

Sebastian