industrial manufacturing but disrupt the business world as a whole However the enormous potential of 3D print ing will be anything but easy to tap as Schaeffler s spe cialist Merklein explains Components can and must be designed in completely different ways for 3D printing this presupposes a totally new type of thinking 3D printing is not always cost efficient For this reason Schaeffler and many other compa nies have long begun to explore the manufacturing prin ciple that was first described by the Japanese scientist Hideo Kodama as early as in 1981 We introduced ad ditive technology in the late 1990s at first exclusively for rapid prototyping and since 2012 for producing func tional components as well says Merklein Subsequent ly the growing importance of 3D printing motivated Schaeff ler to make further investments in the technolo gy In 2015 an Additive Manufacturing Fab Shop was established That s a hybrid of a so called FabLab for experimentation and a shop floor for production ex plains the expert One of the objectives pursued by his team of currently nine members is to drive additive man ufacturing of smart tools and functional prototypes us ing 3D printing for customer applications says Merklein On the other hand we re already systematically inves tigating opportunities for additive technology to make positive contributions to our production system Colleagues from other departments who have heard about this topic regularly visit Merklein s fab shop kingdom to ask if a specific part can also be 3D print ed Typically these are still components that have been designed for conventional manufacturing says Schaeffler s additive manufacturing expert In that case he and his team investigate to what extent a 3D print ing friendly design is possible so that the benefits of the new technology can be used In many cases this is possible but in others it s not says Merklein As a rule of thumb we can say that the greater the complexity of the component and the smaller the production volume the more an addi tive method currently pays off However the costs have to be carefully analyzed on a case by case basis One of the advantages of 3D printing which per se is a com plex technology is the fact that because tools or cast ing molds are no longer necessary even the production of small volumes may be a cost efficient option Anoth er benefit lies in the fact that 3D printing methods al low shapes to be produced that are impossible or only very difficult to make using conventional technologies A case in point are meandering cooling ducts for in jection molding where you d have to drill around a cor ner which as we all know doesn t work explains Schaeffler s specialist Printer manufacturers have more homework to do too Time savings are another advantage While today I still have to produce spare parts at our manufacturing site and then ship them to customers all over the world For this tool base frame of a press two columns were printed onto a base plate using powder deposition welding in the 3D hybrid printer from DMG Mori depicted below and subsequently smoothed out by milling In view of the growing importance of 3D printing Schaeffler established a specialized department as early as in 2015 the Additive Manufacturing Fab Shop where smart tools and functional prototypes are produced using additive methods 113 112

Vorschau Schaeffler tomorrow 03-2018 EN Seite 112
Hinweis: Dies ist eine maschinenlesbare No-Flash Ansicht.
Klicken Sie hier um zur Online-Version zu gelangen.