Digitising part production: A new approach to creating unique part IDs for MIM components

Terms such as Industry 4.0 and the Digital Twin trace back to the growing trend to digitise industrial processes. Modern production equipment delivers a huge quantity of process data, and the continuous analysis and correlation of these data could result in process stability improvements, less scrap and enhanced traceability. For such advances to be applied to MIM production, the permanent surface marking of each part with a unique ID is required. In this article, Prof Dr-Ing Frank Petzoldt and Lutz Kramer, from Fraunhofer IFAM, Bremen, Germany, report on the development of a process that offers a cost-effective solution to what currently poses a significant technical challenge.