Enabling 'Freedom of Design', Additive Manufacturing (AM) has the potential to revolutionize product development and production processes in the future. However, to advance the technology and to increase its market penetration, it is necessary to create a broad awareness of its fascinating capabilities among potential users. Reciprocally, technology suppliers need tangible feedback with regard to future market requirements to focus their research. The process of aligning the technological development with future market requirements is exactly the process to perform the transition of AM from an emerging to a production-rugged technology. According to our experience, this process requires for a strategic perspective in terms of an anticipation of the future technology performance and corresponding markets/applications. This is the starting point of the project 'Research Strategies for Additive Manufacturing Technologies', conducted by the Heinz Nixdorf Institute (University of Paderborn) and the Direct Manufacturing Research Center. The goal is to develop promising research strategies to effectively enable AM-technologies for the production of end-use parts - the so called Direct Manufacturing. Firstly, the current and future business of AM were analysed and anticipated, respectively. This provides contemporary applications of the technology, and AM-technology providers get an idea of how the areas of application for their products may look like in the future. By utilizing the market of tomorrow, promising ideas for potential applications were developed. These in turn automatically set technological and market requirements that were validated in expert surveys. As a result, innovation roadmaps were created, indicating when the developed applications can be manufactured, as technological requirements will be fulfilled. The requirements basically represent research fields that need to be explored to advance the technology in accordance to the market requirements. To deduce the research demand, the research activity and intensity of selected AM-institutes in the identified research fields were determined as part of a survey. Furthermore, the research fields' future relevance was validated in a survey. Based on this, the research fields that are of future importance and are barely developed at the same time - the so called 'White Spots' - were revealed. Merging all results, promising research strategies for AM are being developed. In this paper, this procedure is drawn on the example of the aerospace industry, covering, inter alia, the following aspects: future aerospace applications of AM, the required technological advancements, the Additive Manufacturing Research Map, and the 'White Spots' for future research strategies.
Future-oriented research strategies for additive manufacturing
2012
8 Seiten, 6 Bilder, 10 Quellen
Conference paper
Storage medium
English
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