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Enabling laser powder bed fusion for high precision mass production of multi-material components on dissimilar substrate materials

GlobalAM

A New Approach Towards Industrialization of Additive Manufacturing

Laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) is an additive manufacturing technology in which a component is built up layer by layer from a powder bed. The technology inherently allows the production of complex geometries but isn’t yet introduced to mass markets. The reasons are low production speed and thus small lot sizes, the limited number of established materials, the tendency to produce defects, and the necessity of extensive postprocessing. 
 
GlobalAM is a project supported by EU funding (https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101138289) dedicated to exploring new avenues for an industrialization of metal laser powder bed fusion by limiting the generative manufacturing step to small functional components built on top of premanufactured substrates independent of the substrates’ material thus pushing hybrid production to the extreme.

The project aims to join components and substrates reliably, with high precision and without introducing defects, while allowing the choice of substrate and component materials according to their functional requirements. Cutting on the build volume, pre- and post-processing, and combining residual stress control with state-of-the-art beam splitting and shaping techniques will enable a dramatic acceleration in the production of customized components of unprecedented geometric complexity for a wide range of applications, intelligently combining the best of conventional and additive manufacturing techniques. GlobalAM expects this to be an enabler for establishing the technology in mass production.

To make this project successful, experts from renowned universities and world-leading companies in the disciplines of production technology, laser systems, process development/monitoring/control, and modelling/simulation, as well as powder production for advanced multi-material powders, join their efforts in close multi-national cooperation to overcome the following challenges.
 

Project

Machine Concept –

System Development for

Mass Production

To compete with conventional manufacturing techniques, a machine concept that enables fast, reliable and defect-free build processes at maximum productivity is key. Therefore, a key outcome of the project is a machine concept that combines a fast substrate positioning and fixation system with beam splitting and beam shaping as well as advanced process monitoring and control to enable highly cost-effective, yet flexible and precise production.

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Industrialisation Demonstrator
for Power Electronics

As a demonstrator, a cooling device for power electronics is chosen because it combines typical challenges in a prototypical way: complex metal geometries made of challenging materials such as copper are built on a ceramic-based substrate with the required precision in the low micrometre range. Today, heat sinks with limited complexity are soldered onto the substrate to be cooled. This adds layers, lengthens the cooling path and reduces thermal efficiency. As a result, the dimensions of the cooler must be increased. Printing heat sinks directly onto the substrate eliminates the need for additional layers and significantly reduces thermal resistance. This allows for a smaller package volume/smaller semiconductor chips and therefore reduced costs. In addition, the design freedom offered by additive manufacturing allows cooling devices to be further improved in terms of cooling performance, helping to reduce package volume even further. Furthermore, in conventional manufacturing, tooling for complex cooling structure geometries is costly and time-consuming. In contrast, laser powder bed fusion is a fully digital, flexible process. With an expected market size of several million pcs/year inverters or more general power electronics is a true mass application of metal laser powder bed fusion addressing key industries such as automotive electronics and supporting electrified mobility and global sustainability.

Our Partners

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The department of Metallic Materials of the Institute of Materials Engineering at the University of Kassel focuses on process-microstructure-property-damage relationships in conventionally and additively processed metallic materials. Generally, the research interests can be departed into four main groups. Besides Additive Manufacturing (AM) and Shape Memory Alloys (SMA), the activities in the department focus on residual stresses as well as fatigue and damage.
In case of AM, powder bed processes (PBF-LB/M and PBF-EB/M) as well as laser metal deposition / direct metal deposition (LMD/DED/DMD) are used to realise microstructurally and functionally graded components. Research activities include the realisation and in-depth characterization of filigree lattice structures. In-situ characterization techniques are widely employed to assess microstructure-property relationships on the local scale. A special emphasis is on the development of novel alloys for AM. Based on a profound knowledge of the open challenges in AM, i.e. porosity, anisotropy, residual stress, chemical heterogeneity, surface roughness, limited damage tolerance, etc., new alloy designs are proposed and assessed to overcome such issues. So far, the focus was on metallic alloys for structural applications, e.g. Ti-6Al-4V, aluminium alloys, stainless steels, and Ni-based superalloys, however, within the last few years also numerous SMAs processed by AM were investigated.
The department of Metallic Materials has access to numerous advanced characterisation methods. Lab-based experiments including mechanical tests (under quasi-static and cyclic loading), optical microscopy, high-resolution electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, computed tomography (CT), X-ray diffraction (texture, phase fractions and residual stress) as well as mechanical residual stress measurements by means of the hole drilling method are further supported by in-situ experiments based on Neutron- and Synchrotron-diffraction. Not only the use of well-established approaches is considered, but also new and efficient approaches, e.g. for screening of material properties are elaborated and assessed.
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Conference talk from Prof. Mohamad Bayat from DTU at LANE 2024

17.09.2024

Community Events

Scheduled

Bosch | Formnext 2024

November 19-22, Frankfurt, Germany

Past Events

Talk of Prof. Mohamad Bayat from DTU | LANE 17.09.2024, Fürth, Germany Talk of Prof. Mohamad Bayat from DTU | ICTAM 27.08.2024, Daegu, Korea Bosch | Solid Freeform Fabrication 2024 August 11-14, Austin, USA Safina | Rapid+TCT 2024 June 25-27, Los Angeles, USA ​Bosch | AWT Expert Committee on Metallpowder Design and Additive Manufacturing 2024 May 23, Siegen, Germany ​​Bosch | Rapid.tech3D 2024 May 14-16, Erfurt, Germany GlobalAM | The Manufacturing Partnership Days May 7-8, Brüssel, Belgium ​ Bosch | Microprinting 2024 March 18-20, Dresden, Germany Amazemet | AMUG 2024 March 10-14, Chicago, Illinois, USA ​Amazemet | TMS 2024 March 3-7, Orlando Florida, USA​​

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Your contact person
Dr. Frank Sarfert

+49 711 811-10785

Robert Bosch GmbH

Robert-Bosch-Campus 1 

71272 Renningen

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