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Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing at the Clausthal Center for Materials Technology at Clausthal University of Technology
Additive manufacturing technologies are fundamentally changing the way products are developed, manufactured and delivered to consumers. Numerous research projects show the great potential for this. The consensus is that cost-effective use requires high material application rates and an end-to-end process chain - from component design to the manufacturing process.
The research focus at CZM aims to tap into and utilize the potential of wire arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) for the production of complex structural components with locally adapted material properties. Although this process is widely used, the potential of targeted heat and material input for the properties of multimaterial systems in monolithic components has not yet been exploited. At CZM, this potential is being researched and harnessed for the development and manufacture of completely new components using new methods and processes. The basis for this is the investigation and description of the process-specific interactions between product development, process technology, process control and process simulation in an interdisciplinary research team.
We are pursuing the vision of material-efficient production of complex and highly stressed structural components and a new dimension of design freedom and functional integration. It should be possible to efficiently develop and manufacture components such as drill heads or deep-drawing tools, which were previously manufactured and reworked at great expense, not only in quantities of one, but also with material properties precisely adjusted for the intended application in a continuous process with a high degree of automation. To this end, process-specific findings for wire arc additive manufacturing are being developed and generally applicable methods and processes for the integrated development and flexible process control of additively manufactured, monolithic components are being researched and tested. With the help of a demonstrator system, it will be shown how partially defined material properties and functional surfaces as well as specific functional materials can be realized fully automatically in a monolithic component based on a few and application-specific boundary conditions (e.g. installation space, force application points, thermal load, surface stress) with a high degree of material utilization.
In order to research the methods, technological principles and processes required for this, various working groups in the fields of product development, production engineering, materials science, metrology, mechanics, control engineering and computer science are working together at CZM.
