Accelerating the additive manufacturing of metal components by at least a factor of 10 - this was the goal of the Fraunhofer lighthouse project "futureAM - Next Generation Additive Manufacturing", which was launched in 2017. By the end of the project in November 2020, six Fraunhofer institutes had jointly achieved technological leaps in system technology, materials and process control as well as end-to-end digitalization, thereby increasing the performance and cost-effectiveness of metal additive manufacturing along the entire process chain. The Virtual Lab plays an important role in this, bundling expertise digitally and making the entire AM process transparent for all partners involved. We are now on the threshold of industrial implementation.
The sub-projects included supporting laser cladding with the help of AI-supported process analysis (Fraunhofer IWS), the production of components using laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) or extreme high-speed laser cladding (EHLA) (Fraunhofer ILT) as well as optimizations in post-processing (Fraunhofer IWU).
