Earlier this year, I took a tour of Materials Solutions - a Siemens Business' new additive manufacturing (AM) facility in Worcester, UK. The facility, dedicated to direct metal AM, currently houses more than 20 machines with the capacity to extend to around 50. It’s a smart factory in every sense of the word, covering the AM production line from digital file all the way to finished part, with one exception; the trusty little chisel that sits in the post-processing station of the factory floor, used to knock o supports from laser sintered parts destined for Siemens Power and Gas, and customers in the aerospace, automotive and other industrial markets.
That chisel is not an uncommon sight for any digital factory floor, coupled with blast cabinets for manual powder removal. Therefore, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that German powder removal solutions specialist Solukon Maschinenbau GmbH took home the award in the post-processing category at this year’s TCT Awards ceremony for its intelligent de-powdering solution, the product of a collaboration with none other than Siemens, which now has five Solukon systems at its Worcestor site.
"We quickly realised that this was a very good fit for the type of de-powdering that we wanted for complex additively manufactured parts," Nick Turner, Project Manager at Materials Solutions, told TCT on the TCT Show floor. “We’re now experimenting with the de-powdering times to make industrialised manufacture of additive parts more efficient and more reliable. Using the Solukon machines, we have confidence that we’ll de-powder the parts effectively meaning that we have more confidence in our downstream processes.”
You’ll hear post-processing referred to as a few things in the AM world; the Achilles heel, the dirty secret. A word you will rarely hear associated with it, is intelligent. This winning solution packages Siemens software knowledge with Solukon’s post processing expertise into an SFM-AT800-S de-powdering system. Equipped with an intelligent algorithm, the machine rotates the part in a sequence derived from its CAD geometry, rather than programmed, to successfully and safely remove residual powder from even the most inaccessible areas.
Andreas Hartmann, CEO/CTO at Solukon, explained: “Siemens came and said, ‘let’s do a software that detects the internal channels of the part so that our machine moves exactly along a path, along the labyrinth’. So, we changed the machine with two endless rotating axes to give more freedom for rotation.”
“It has given us a confidence in our process that wasn’t present before and that’s something that we pass on to our customers as well,” Turner said. “So, with the confidence that we can effectively de- powder complex components, we know that we can focus our efforts on our other downstream processes and continue our automation journey knowing that this stage of the journey is a gap that has been filled effectively.”
Manufacturing for the gas and power industry means a huge portion of Materials Solutions output are large-scale parts with internal cavities. Dealing at these volumes, there may be multiple parts placed on a single build plate and it is crucial that each is processed in the same way to ensure repeatability.
“We have the digital link on our Solukon machines where we can tailor our de-powdering programmes specific to the parts that we want to de-powder,” Turner adds. “If we know we have a certain complex channel structure on a part, then we can design the routing for de-powdering specifically on that part.”
Yet, there’s another major advantage to this automated solution. In the list of AM benefits you’ll no doubt hear reeled o at any given conference, one is sustainability. Unlike subtractive manufacturing, additive allows you to use up only the material you need, but what about powder that doesn’t get used? Solukon’s intention is to reclaim that residual powder, free of contamination and ready for further processing.
Hartmaan concludes: “We are concentrating on the sustainability and I think [this is] a good product to have in the industry, to have a sustainable tool for reclamation of powder, recovery of powder and [provide] much more for health and safety and automation.”
"powder" - Google News
December 28, 2019 at 09:10PM
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Additive manufacturing powder removal gets smart - TCT Magazine
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