The Potential Of High Speed Sintering For Small Series In The Automotive Industry

Abstract

Individualization in the high-performance segment within the automotive industry is becoming increasingly important. Especially when small volumes are required, conventional manufacturing processes often no longer prove profitable. The use of additive processes in general and high-speed sintering (HSS) in particular of-fer the freedom to produce complex organic shapes in a cost-effective and re-source-saving manner from batch size one onwards. The HSS process is a pow-der bed-based additive manufacturing process in which thermoplastics are sin-tered at a constant layer time using an infrared lamp instead of a laser. For this reason, we shed light on the use of high-speed sintering specifically for small components in low-volume production. More precisely, we add the pro-cess-specific properties of high-speed sintering to Design for Additive Manufac-turing (DfAM) rules. We propose an approach that also enables a time-saving al-ternative to conventional manufacturing processes and optimizes the design pro-cess for the use of high-speed sintering.