Research

Wherever innovations and personalized products are desired: With almost unlimited freedom of design, additive manufacturing technologies open up new perspectives to achieve constructive solutions. These types of manufacturing techniques barely set any limits to the spirit of innovation. Additive manufacturing techniques follow the trend towards individual customized products and will allow for serial production in the future.

To take advantage of the potentials included in additive manufacturing techniques the new Collaborative Research Centre 814 does fundamental research on this technology, so it can be used for the production of multifunctional components. The most important thing is to analyse the process chain from beginning to end. This not only includes design and process simulation, but also especially characteristics, creation and modification of suitable materials and their reactions in the fabrication process, up to the final component.

First, there is the fundamental analysis of existing powder and beam-based additive manufacturing processes. A multidisciplinary team of researchers explores which holistic strategies concerning material and process have to be developed and implemented to achieve optimum results, i.e. to gain a broad basis of fundamental inter-relations in regard to optimized component properties. This includes:

  • Preprocessing (component design and simulation, raw material properties)
  • Processing (generation of geometry)
  • Postprocessing (component testing)
  • Quality assurance

The CRC 814 creates the scientific basics for the production of geometrically complex and highly functionalized multi-material parts, as well as for computer-aided component design and component testing. It is divided into four major-areas:

  • Project-area A: Powder- / Materials
  • Project-area B: Processes
  • Project-area C: Components
  • Project-area T: Transfer

To achieve the challenging targets of the CRC 814 – „Additive Manufacturing” Collaborative Research Centre, the 17 sub-projects closely work together on all levels – including the working groups “powder technology”, “measurement methods”, “modeling” and „multi-material“ which were especially established for this purpose.