PRINT-AM
Current international state of the art in wire & arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) of large-scale steel components mainly focuses on realising a correct geometry and a lot of uncertainties remain to linking the final functional properties with the printing material and strategy. Therefor the ICON project PRINT-AM is envisaging to develop both the missing modelling as well as experimental screening capabilities to facilitate a swift industrial uptake of WAAM for the safe and cost-efficient production of large scale industrial components which bear a safety-critical function.
Based on an extensive industry survey within the framework of the EIT Knowledge and Innovation Community “Raw Materials”; three innovations were identified having an increasing level of scientific and technological complexity:
These market-pull innovations have been translated into the following concrete PRINT-AM objectives:
- Defining the right print strategy to produce replacement parts or temporary repair, to produce functionally-driven reverse-engineered components as well as to produce intelligent “hybrid” solutions aimed at TCO-optimisation by the development of a reverse analysis tool based on multi-scale reverse metallurgical in combination with a physical metallurgical welding model.
- Validating on lab scale the effectiveness of the proposed printing strategies as well as the validity of the multi-scale modelling results and to screen a wide variety of technological options via down scaled testing using combinatorial alloy & lab wire production methodologies.
- Developing a techno-economic model which will allow end-users to optimize the total cost of ownership (TCO).
This project is part of:
Material durability and modelling of the loading of metals in an environment causing degradation (corrosion, abrasion, fatigue).