Additive Manufacturing Strategies: A Chat with a Panel of Industry Experts

Additive Manufacturing (AM) of parts can take many shapes, from steel parts on trains to coat hangers, from rugged tools on tactical vehicles to components on electric supercars. That's a wide variety of applications but no matter the industry and no matter the use case, there are consistent best practices to help you identify your first AM part. You also need to consider how to select the best AM technology for your needs, how to choose the materials you want to use, and how to scale up your AM production.

Host Fabian Alefeld welcomes an all-star guest panel to share their expertise on the past, present, and future of AM. Stefanie Brickwede, Head of AM at Deutsche Bahn, John Wilczynski, Executive Director of America Makes, and Florian Lassan, Senior Business Development Manager of 3YOURMIND offer insights for the next generation of AM parts and applications.

Key Takeaways:

[1:53] Stefanie describes her roles and how MGA works to lower the hurdles of AM.

[3:23] John describes the goal of America Makes and his role in the organization.

[5:20] Florian describes the 3YOURMIND business model.

[6:55] How John discovered his first AM parts and how he calculated the total ownership costs.

[11:34] Convincing colleagues to adopt 3D printed parts was one of Stefanie’s first challenges at Deutsche Bahn.

[15:37] Florian’s group was tasked to design a control part for an electric supercar.

[18:40] Strategies for success in finding AM parts should mirror the overarching corporate strategies of an organization.

[24:45] Advice about how to implement AM into a supply and value chain.

[31:40] Stefanie details the process Deutsche Bahn created to accelerate the printing of parts to 25,000.

[34:25] The importance of specifications and standards when scaling from conventional to additive manufacturing.

[42:11] Advice from Florian and Stefanie about integrating AM strategies into an existing organization and convincing nonbelievers to use the technology.

Shareables: 

“How do we get more people to understand where it fits, how it fits, where to use it, when not to use it? We do it primarily through the three main pillars of our organization. Those are the development of technology, development of the educational or kind of workforce community, and development of the ecosystem meaning it’s the community that's ultimately going to take the technology and do something with it.” — John Wilczynski, Executive Director, America Makes on The Additive Snack Podcast

“The next parts we printed were metal and this is really crucial because we really had problems to convince our colleagues in the maintenance sides that 3D printing is a technology you can rely on and as much as something to print the Star Wars figurines.” — Stefanie Brickwede, Head of AM, Deutsche Bahn on The Additive Snack Podcast

“Manufacturing a tool for injection molding for such a low number of parts does not make sense. It was a good use case for additive manufacturing to manufacture that component. So, we optimized the design to cool this electric component and we used the freedom of design with additive to put some lightweight design for the part.” — Florian Lassan, Sr. Business Development Manager, 3YOURMIND on The Additive Snack Podcast
 

The Additive Snack Podcast is brought to you by EOS.