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.
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.
Project News
Community Events
Scheduled
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
Your contact person
Dr. Frank Sarfert
+49 711 811-10785
Robert Bosch GmbH
Robert-Bosch-Campus 1
71272 Renningen