Model-based mechanical design and process planing for incremental manufacturing of multi-material workpieces

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Variant flexibility of products is a consequencs of cost efficiency, material efficiency and resource efficiency. Economic success and high productivity in large volume series production of workpieces with complex geometry is commonly achieved through the principle of mold- and forming-tool-based processes. It is specific for such processes that the workpiece geometry is defined by the geometry of the tool (examples: injection molding, forming). It is a painful consequence of product diversification (which implies an increasing number of variants) that lot sizes decrease, so that variant specific invest in tool based technologies increases. There is hence a strong need for fundamentally new production concepts that attain significant reduction of variant specific effort while maintaining the capability to provide large volume series. The project proposers approach this problem by combining existing manufacturing processes with additive manufacturing processes for synergistically, in order to qualify this technology combination for functionalised multi-material workpieces. In preliminary work, this research area has been structured and described by the project proposers. Currently, experimental infrastructure is under development and will be realized in the “incremental manufacturing lab” at TU Braunschweig (founded by DFG-Großgerät). The fundamental principle of “incremental manufacturing” consists of robot-based additive finalization of prefabricated base workpieces (e.g. preformed sheet metal, profile geometries) with high material deposition rate and, subsequently, their calibration of the function surfaces. This new manufacturing concept shall show new ways of large volume series production of variant-rich workpiece portfolios. However, the large number of degrees of freedom raises fundamental research questions with respect to product and process definition. It is the aim of this project to propose and elaborate an integrated method for workpiece and manufacturing design for incremental manufacturing. The conjunction of design principles for partially additively manufactured multi-material workpieces and the determination of manufacturing strategies is necessary to exploit the benefits of incremental manufacturing.