Publikationen

Additive manufacturing becomes a more and more important technology for production, mainly driven by the ability to realise extremely complex structures using multiple materials but without assembly or excessive waste. Nevertheless, like any high-precision technology additive manufacturing responds to interferences during the manufacturing process. These interferences – like vibrations – might lead to deviations in product quality, becoming manifest for instance in a reduced lifetime of a product or application issues. This study targets the issue of detecting such interferences during a manufacturing process in an exemplary experimental setup. Collection of data using current sensor technology directly on a 3D-printer enables a quantitative detection of interferences. The evaluation provides insights into the effectiveness of the realised application-oriented setup, the effort required for equipping a manufacturing system with sensors, and the effort for acquisition and processing the data. These insights are of practical utility for organisations dealing with additive manufacturing: the chosen approach for detecting interferences shows promising results, reaching interference detection rates of up to 100% depending on the applied data processing configuration.

The increasing potential of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) drives higher degrees of digitisation in the manufacturing industry. Such catchphrases as “Industry 4.0” and “smart manufacturing” reflect this tendency. The implementation of these paradigms is not merely an end to itself, but a new way of collaboration across existing department and process boundaries. Converting the process input, internal and output data into digital twins offers the possibility to test and validate the parameter changes via simulations, whose results can be used to update guidelines for shop-floor workers. The result is a Cyber-Physical System (CPS) that brings together the physical shop-floor, the digital data created in the manufacturing process, the simulations, and the human workers. The CPS offers new ways of collaboration on a shared data basis: the workers can annotate manufacturing problems directly in the data, obtain updated process guidelines, and use knowledge from other experts to address issues. Although the CPS cannot replace manufacturing management since it is formalised through various approaches, e. g., Six-Sigma or Advanced Process Control (APC), it is a new tool for validating decisions in simulation before they are implemented, allowing to continuously improve the guidelines.