Accelerating the industrialization of metal 3D printing

Tuesday 25^th 2022: Metal 3D printing and its impact in industrial manufacturing is a major topic at DESY. For this reason seven experts hat joint forces to present their ideas how to accelerate the industrialization of this new technology.

The online-event started with a keynote held by Henning Fehrmann, CEO Fehrmann Tech Group. He focused on the fundamental relevance for each company to build resilient supply chains. He surprised the participants with a huge shift in awareness: While before the pandemic 3D printing and supply chains were topics of minor importance for CEOs by the end of 2021 disrupted supply chains had become a huge topic and 3D printing had turned into a relevant part of the highly talked about industry 4.0. No wonder after all the turbulences in the supply chains the industrial manufactures have experienced in the last two years. Fehrmann explained the risk trends of global supply chains, the relevant factors to consider when evaluating the individual supply chain resilience and possible solutions. Besides reliable delivery of materials and components 3D printing has become a key production technology. While still a young technology it nevertheless has reached the level of industrial manufacturing and is an excellent flexible back up option to guarantee the continuation of the production process even in case of an interrupted supply chain. Important parts which can’t be delivered by suppliers can be printed on site instead. And there are a couple of big companies which have already invested in hundreds of 3D printers for exactly this purpose. To push this positive development of 3D printing standardization is important as much as more collaboration and an exchange of experiences of all the researchers, material developers and other experts in this field. Henning Fehrmann’s company Fehrmann Alloys supports its customers with reliable delivery of standard metalpowders and high performance aluminium for 3D printing. Fehrmann Alloys has been well known for close collaboration with excellent research institutes in the field of material science.

Here an overview of the following presentations:

Dr. Marc Thiry, Industrial Relations Manager at Helmholtz Zentrum Hereon, presented various examples for the analysis of additively manufactured samples on Hereon’s materials sciences beamlines at PETRA III

Dr. Bernhard Hesse, Co-founder of the company Xploraytion GmbH, a service provider specialized on synchrotron-based bio-medical and material applications, spoke about the chances and challenges of synchrotron µCT imaging for metal additive manufacturing in industrial application

Dr. Ulrich Lienert, responsible scientist for the materials science beamline P21.2 and adjunct professor at the materials department at KTH Stockholm, presented several case studies which are relevant to 3D printing, for example on the characterization of bulk metals by high-energy synchrotron radiation

Dr. Pere Barriobero-Vila, scientist at the Institute of Materials Research of the German Aerospace Center DLR, gave insights into alloy and part development for laser-based metal additive manufacturing

Dr. Thomas Keller, staff scientist at DESY NanoLab and lecturer at University of Hamburg presented the microscopy of DESY NanoLab – this lab provides access to advanced nano-characterization, nano-structuring and nano-synthesis techniques which are complementary to the advanced X-ray techniques available at DESY’s lightsources

Dr. Antony Vamvakeros, Research and Development Lead Scientist at Finden Ltd, gave a talk on chemical tomography for investigating materials and devices