Tooling

January 30, 2023 by AddUp

Interview of WBA and AddUp Managers to explain the background and goals of a joint initiative of creating an AM Tooling Competence Center at the WBA in early 2023.

Original Interview by Martin Ricchiuti of FORM+Werkzeug

The WBA Aachen Toolmaking Academy supports tool and mold makers in developing technological innovations for the industry. AddUp, a joint venture established by Michelin and Fives, is a global OEM of multi-technology production systems and a market leader in additive solutions.

In the FORM+Tool interview with Prof. Wolfgang Boos, Managing Partner of the WBA, and Julien Marcilly, Deputy Chief Executive Officer at AddUp, the background and goals of the joint initiative of an AM Tooling Competence Center at the WBA, which will start in early 2023, are explained will start.

Finding Additive Solutions: Easy Entry to Additive Manufacturing

AddUp will make its FormUp 350 additive manufacturing system based on the LPBF process available to the WBA. With additive manufacturing, the potential for local tool and mold making is to be tapped, and the process chain is further developed.

With the founding of the AM Tooling Competence Center at the WBA, Julien Marcilly from AddUp (right) and Prof. Wolfgang Boos from the WBA create a competence center for additive manufacturing in tool and mold making. © AddUp

FORM+Tool: Mr. Marcilly, what are the goals of AddUp with the new AM Tooling Competence Center, and what role does AddUp play in the cooperation?

Marcilly: With our AddUp GmbH, founded in April 2022 in Aachen, we are pursuing the strategic goal of opening up the German market for metal 3D printing for us. So it is only logical to enter into a partnership with the WBA. We know that there is comprehensive competence for the needs of tool and mold making, which can make a significant contribution to further advancing acceptance among users and the technology itself. We will install our latest PBF system ‘FormUp 350‘ (Powder Bed Fusion), in a dedicated hall within the WBA’s demonstration tool shop and make it accessible to potential customers. Once the plant is installed, we will place three to four application engineers and plant operators there to accompany interested parties with their first steps with metal 3D printing on our system and on the way to the first required parts with all our know-how. In addition, further developments in PBF technology are to take place on this machine together with the experts from the WBA.

FW: Prof. Boos, is 3D printing a new field of technology for the WBA that you would like to develop with the support of AddUp?

Boos: So far, the focus at the WBA has been on the classic five technologies in toolmaking. However, about four years ago, together with the partners in our toolmaking community, we started to explore the market for 3D printing in a targeted manner for high-potential solutions for the requirements of toolmaking. We were very pleased when, in the context of corona-related digital workshops and discussions with AddUp, it became clear in 2021 that an AM Tooling Competence Center represents a win-win situation for both sides.

Because for the WBA, it is a compellingly logical step to introduce this sixth technology in tool and mold making. If a partner as strong as AddUp enters the community and also agrees to install a corresponding system on which you can not only improve and optimize parts but also the process together with experienced AddUp experts for the benefit of the user, then this is a remarkably successful constellation. We look forward to working closely with you.

FW: You talk about optimizing the PBF technology. What do you mean by that?

Boos: I think it’s essential to develop a feeling for handling the materials and what performance can be achieved with the systems under optimized conditions. At the same time, however, there are also issues, such as digitization, that need to be addressed. What can be implemented as a connection? You have to get to know a lot more about the material and process. We have therefore agreed that, in addition to the two partners, AddUp and WBA, we will also involve the entire community with around 85 companies.

In this way, a much larger number of impulses and ideas come about in terms of powder, process, components, and applications. In this way, requirements are defined that can be specifically tested. This is the ideal start to act together as a problem solver in the AM context.

The ‘FormUp 350’ has up to four 500-watt ytterbium fiber lasers as a beam source and can build up parts with an edge length of up to 350 mm in layers in the cube. © AddUp

FW: The equipment and staff come from AddUp; what does the WBA bring to the cooperation?

Boos: We are also contributing a 3D printing expert from the WBA who has accumulated expertise over the years. However, our focus will be on acquiring components and addressing tool and mold makers. AddUp acts as a partner who supports us in working out the best possible process for the production of all the required components. In addition, with our classic methods, we can complete the process chain in the context of post-processing of 3D-printed components. The AM Tooling Competence Center will have a unique selling proposition because we will cover the entire process chain right through to the ready-to-use 3D-printed tool component.

Tool and mold makers can build on the extensive expertise of AddUp and the WBA in the new AM Tooling Competence Center in Aachen. The focus is on the entire process chain from design, analysis, and production to post-processing. © AddUp

FW: To arouse the interest of tool and mold makers: What specific problem cases do you want to tackle?

Marcilly: There is enormous potential for use in terms of minimized cycle times in injection molding. Our system can process fine powder with a small grain size, which brings advantages in the production of conformal cooling channels and, as a result, increases the cost-effectiveness of injection molding. We have also already developed a new tool steel and manufactured the first parts, but this is just the beginning. We are in the process of developing special steels for mold inserts in the field of stamping and forming tool construction. Looking ahead, the focus is also on tools for medical technology applications and die-casting tools.

FW: How does this cooperation support the strategic orientation of the WBA, especially with the aforementioned topic of digitization?

Boos: For about five years, WBA’s range of services has included not only the five classic technologies in isolation but also the manufacture of individual components through to complete tools. This enables us to generate up to one million euros in sales per year. We will now expand this with the sixth technology in the form of a comprehensive consulting and manufacturing service for all aspects of 3D-printed metal components. From my point of view, this includes, in particular, the entire Industry 4.0 topic.

Where currently only structure-borne noise sensors or shot counters are integrated, I am convinced that we can reach a completely new level with appropriately printed 3D components and sensors integrated into them. There are still numerous approaches and research goals that we want to pursue together.

With the involvement of AddUp in the AM Tooling Competence Center, the network of the WBA is expanded to include the key competence of 3D printing. © AddUp

FW: What appeal is made to the tool and mold-making industry at this point?

Boos: A characteristic of the classic tool and mold maker is that he has to see it first to believe that it works. Choosing to start with the component you actually need would only make sense on a case-by-case basis because that requires previous knowledge, such as a design suitable for 3D printing. As a competence center, we want to develop unique solutions together with our customers. Our offer should be an ‘Easy Entry to Additive Manufacturing, with the appeal: “Call us, no matter what it is about in the context of 3D printing.”

Marcilly: The alternative would be for the customer to buy a system. That would be a huge investment to be able to do the first steps and experiments. In practice, this hurdle is too high. In contrast, here at the AM Tooling Competence Center is the machine with the combined expertise of Add Up and WBA, which the customer can use to try their hand at parts or test materials and designs. As a service provider, AddUp prints metal parts worth around 10 million euros in France, so there is already a lot of application expertise that you can tap into and that we make available. With the first experiences and successes, the step is an easy one to invest in your first own add-up system.

FW: When will the AM Tooling Competence Center go online?

Marcilly: The system is currently being installed. We are making a presentation at the AM Tooling Competence Center on October 25, 2022, with the first applications for our AddUp project and development partners. On October 26, all WBA members will receive a tour and presentation at the WBA Annual Meeting. The official opening is planned for early 2023 with a festive kick-off event.

Boos: It’s good that we already have a kind of pre-opening at the end of October for special AddUp customers and the WBA community. On October 27th, we also have the toolmaking colloquium with the EiP award ceremony. Here we can already set the first marker for companies open to new technologies.

Marcilly: We are also presenting the FormUp 350 at the Formnext trade fair in November and look forward to seeing interested parties at our stand E01 in hall 12.0.

FW: Thank you for the interview!

WBA Aachen Toolmaking Academy GmbH

D 52074 Aachen

info@werkzeugbau-akademie.de

www.werkzeugbau-akademie.de

AddUp Global additive solutions

F63118 CEBAZAT

contact@addupsolutions.com

www.addupsolutions.com

Full interview in German read here

May 9, 2022 by AddUp

Additively Manufactured Static Mixer | Blog

Read how AddUp’s roller recoater and finer powder particle size distribution (PSD) provides finer features, improved surface finish and eliminates the needs for supports when producing a static mixer.

Written by: Nick Estock, Director of Applications and Business Development

Additive Manufacturing, like any manufacturing process, has its strengths and weaknesses. All processes typically have value-added steps and necessary secondary operations that are a consequence of their shortcomings. Support structures are one of these necessary evils of AM. They are part of the process but add no value to the final part. In fact, they decrease the value because support structures consume material and machine time but then need to be removed after printing. All of this reduces productivity and ultimately costs you money. So, let’s eliminate them! (OK, maybe minimize them..)

AddUp, a joint venture between Michelin and Fives, developed a system to do just that. Michelin has been utilizing AM since the early 2000s, long before I even knew what a 3D printer was (we didn’t have 3d printers or even smartphones when I was in high school). Michelin utilized the technology first to reduce the development cycle for their tire mold inserts, called sipes. Today, they produce over one million of these sipes a year for their production molds. Critically important features to these sipes are: the resolution down to 0.2mm features, shallow overhangs as low as 15 degrees, and surface finish as low as 4 Ra um, as printed.

So, when Michelin embarked on this joint venture with Fives how did they achieve such a high level of quality? They did so by developing the FormUp 350 as the only industrial Powder Bed Fusion (PBF) machine to utilize a roller recoater in conjunction with a finer powder Particle Size Distribution (PSD). Typical PBF technologies use a PSD ranging from 25-63 um. The FormUp can effectively manage, distribute, and spread powders down to 5-25 um. By using finer powders and a roller, AddUp achieves a better packing density of their build bed up to 70% dense. Combine this with high quality open parameters and you have a recipe to build finer features, better surface finishes and yes less supports, hassle free and right out of the box! What do I mean “right out of the box”? I mean no secret sauce, no special parameters applied in certain areas, and no slowing down the process. Design it, apply your standard parameters, load it on the machine and go!

Let’s take a look an example, a static mixer our applications team developed to illustrate this point better.

What is a static mixer?

Wikipedia defines this as:

“a precision engineered device for the continuous mixing of fluid materials, without moving components.[1] Normally the fluids to be mixed are liquid, but static mixers can also be used to mix gas streams, disperse gas into liquid or blend immiscible liquids.”

In other words, it is a pipe where two or more fluids are introduced at the inlet and carried across a series of “static” elements such as plates or paddles to homogenize the fluids upon exit. Why is this a great additive application? Because you can optimize and customize the design for any given application. Why is a static mixer a difficult part to produce additively? Because the mixing elements pose a problem when printed using traditional AM guidelines. Standard design guidelines for AM means these elements would have to be printed at 45 degree angles. This limitation would require to either elongate the mixing region of the mixer itself and/or add many more elements to achieve the desired performance. Either of these options mean you are no longer leveraging the advantages of additive and what’s left is an ineffective expensive part.

Static Mixer with:	AddUp Static Mixer	Standard AM Guidelines (45˙ fins)	Reduction
Overall Height	305 mm	654 mm	53%
Material Needed	738.5 cc	1583.82 cc	53%
Build Time	88 hours, 32 minutes	189 hours, 51 minutes	53%

The AddUp Static Mixer increased productivity by 53%!

But, what if you didn’t have this limitation?

The static mixer shown here was printed without these limitations. Our engineers designed this mixer with elements as shallow as 25 degrees without any supports while still achieving an acceptable surface finish. Not only that but they designed it in less than two weeks and achieved a first-time yield. How was this possible? AddUp’s roller and fine powder configuration coupled with robust parameters provide new design freedoms for the AM process.

As shown in Exhibits A and B, using a roller system in conjunction with finer powder, the AddUp system can achieve a reduction in surface roughness by about 10 Ra um for any given upskin/downskin angle when compared to medium powder PSDs with blade recoater configurations.

EXHIBIT A

EXHIBIT B

Don’t forget, this was achieved right out of the box and hassle free! There are no special downskin parameters. There is no need for advanced development that can take months and countless hours of engineering and machine time to achieve. These results can be accomplished using our standard, highly productive, bulk and contour parameters. With other machine OEMs, enhanced surface finishes or extreme overhangs often come at the cost of slowing down your productivity. That’s because they are using less laser power at a reduced speed to achieve such results, thus slowing down your productivity. This also introduces additional variables into the mechanical properties of your part. Instead of having a singular set of parameters, yielding a known set of mechanical properties throughout the entire volume of your part, you have created areas that can potentially exhibit different behaviors. The AddUp system achieves these results thanks to a better packing density of our powder bed and our roller with fine powder configuration.

Think this is all too good to be true? Try me! We have just completed the renovation of our Cincinnati facility, serving not only as our US headquarters but also as a technical demonstration center. From powder to part, our workshop has the full capabilities to run benchmark, functional prototypes and even production parts. Our team is ready to support our customers just tip toeing into AM to turnkeying an industrialized application.

Use the form below to tell us about your project and we’ll show you the AddUp difference! We look forward to the opportunity to “un-support” your applications!

November 4, 2021 by AddUp

Metal additive manufacturing, specifically laser powder bed fusion (L-PBF) technology, offers new possibilities for the molding and tooling sectors. It enables the production of molds with complex geometries, interlocking parts, and conformal cooling channels, leading to improved productivity, reduced cooling times, and enhanced part quality.

Manufacturers in the molding and tooling sectors are now making extensive use of 3D printing. They use plastic 3D printing to make prototype injection or lost-wax molds, 3D sand printing to make inserts, or stack multiple mold layers to make stack molds. Metal additive manufacturing, on the other hand, is developing less rapidly. However, laser powder bed fusion (L-PBF) technology has several interesting advantages for these sectors.

New applications in the field of injection molding

PBF technology offers several ways to improve the injection molding process. First, the ability of the L-PBF process to produce parts with complex geometries makes it possible to consider new shapes. The walls of the mold that make contact with the plastic part have the possibility to gain complexity but are limited for two reasons; the need to access the surfaces with machining and polishing tools to reduce their roughness and the need to respect draft angles as the mold shapes must allow the part to be unmolded.

Nevertheless, there are still avenues to explore. As L-PBF technology allows for the manufacture of interlocking parts, mold designers can imagine new types of movement within their molds, by placing “drawers” (moving parts) in areas previously impossible to reach with conventional techniques. Reliability can also be improved. Elements assembled by welding or screwing are generally the weak points of molds used in large series, and metal 3D printing offers the prospect of making them in a single operation, and thus improving their lifetime.

Manufacturers considering the use of metal additive manufacturing to produce injection molds should bear in mind that PBF technology is not well suited to the production of massive parts, for reasons of cost but also because of the accumulation of thermal stresses. It should therefore be avoided to produce complete molds, and its use should be limited to areas where it is of interest.

This constraint, which might seem to be a brake on the deployment of this technology in molds, offers interesting prospects. Designing molds in which the solid part is standard and the section close to the molding wall is printed has advantages. Firstly, it is the possibility of carrying out quicker changes of series, as the lead times for obtaining the molds are generally several months. Secondly, it is the opportunity to reduce downtime, as the storage of printed parts is less than the storage of complete molds. Finally, it is the prospect of envisioning small series production which would not have been profitable in view of the investment in a complete mold. Or, in the long term, to move towards the manufacture of customized products, a world that is currently difficult to access for plastic injection parts.

Productivity and quality gains

Before thinking about using metal 3D printing to develop new products and services, it can be useful to use it to improve what already exists. One of the key applications of L-PBF technology in the world of injection molding is a technique called “conformal cooling”. It consists of optimizing the cooling time of plastic parts in injection molds by creating channels that follow the shape of the part to be cooled. These channels are placed as close as possible to the molding wall and make it possible to reduce cooling times, therefore increasing production rates. In an injection cycle, the material cooling stage is generally the longest. It is by reducing this time that the greatest productivity gains can be obtained. Gains can also be made on the appearance of the injected parts, as placing channels in areas that are usually difficult to cool helps to avoid shrinkage or weld lines, which are problems caused by non-optimal cooling.

While injection molding engineers have always been able to design complex control circuits, they have been limited by the mold making techniques. For a long time, the only techniques available to create pipes in a block of metal were drilling, machining, and layering (the mold is designed in separate layers, each of which is milled and drilled so that the layers are joined together to create three-dimensional pipes). Today, with the techniques of additive manufacturing by laser fusion on powder bed, mold manufacturers have access to a total freedom of design for their regulation channels. It should be noted that the surface conditions of the parts produced by laser fusion on powder bed are particularly adapted to the creation of cooling channels: smooth enough not to generate turbulences in the channels, but rough enough to increase the exchange surface compared to channels made by drilling.

Another advantage of conformal cooling is that by placing control channels as close as possible to the mold cavity, the total volume of metal to be cooled is reduced. This allows the mold to reach its operating temperature more quickly and reduces the time from machine start-up to the first good part being produced, leading to productivity gains and a minimizes the number of defective parts.

Production support tools

Whatever the reasons for a manufacturer’s interest in 3D printing, it is always the case that the experience gained from one project gives rise to other ideas, sometimes in other departments of the company. Significant gains can be generated if we look beyond the products sold to customers and the molds needed to manufacture them by considering the production tool. In any production workshop, there are a multitude of tasks that can be simplified, improved, or secured thanks to custom-made tools. From jigs that facilitate assembly operations, through lightweight hand tools with handles adapted to the hand of each operator, to coded tools that avoid errors during assembly… Additive manufacturing offers many ways to reduce production times, improve product quality, or reduce the risk of MSDs (musculoskeletal disorders).

The same is true for manufacturers who use robots or operate automated assembly lines: whenever a moving part can be lightened, this leads to less vibration, less wear and tear, lower energy consumption, and reduced production times. Additive manufacturing provides answers to these lightweight applications by creating recesses within volumes, creating lightweight structures (lattice structures) or utilizing topological optimization.

To develop all these “indirect” applications of additive manufacturing, and to use it to make “tools” in the broadest sense of the term, a good practice is to encourage all operators and technicians to share the culture of additive manufacturing in the company, not only in the design offices, so that all employees are able to propose ideas for improving the production tool.

Conclusion

The applications of metal additive manufacturing in the field of tooling should continue to develop in the years to come, especially as progress is being made every day on productivity, process control and the development of recipes for metals traditionally used by manufacturers in the sector. These applications will be very varied, as they may concern industrialization times, part quality, production rates, fixed assets and the services provided to customers.

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