Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing (WAAM) at the Smart Industry event
Hittech was invited, together with Ramlab (field lab equipped with 3D metal printers), to give a presentation about WAAM (Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing) at the Smart Industry year event. Several field labs presented interesting projects during this event, together with the companies where these projects were carried out.
The livestream of our presentation (Day 2.mp4) can be found here.
Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing, WAAM for short, places a substrate in a protective environment on a base plate, only in the places where that material is needed.
Background
Hittech is always looking for improvements for its customers. One of its customers buys carriers made of full blocks of titanium class 5 (up to 300 kg). However, the final product delivered to the customer is only 10% of the original material. This entails high costs for the customer and is also not really sustainable.
Hittech has investigated whether Selective Laser Melting would be a more sustainable solution, but this turned out to be even more expensive than the current way of working where a lot of material is milled away. Hittech decided to look further and investigated another process, namely WAAM. Since research into these processes is very resource-intensive (people, money and time), collaboration was sought with Ramlab.
Together with Ramlab, Hittech produced a ¼-carrier using the WAAM process. While there is certainly still room for improvement, this has resulted in a cost reduction of 20%.
The proposal to the customer has been made.
