Additive Manufacturing at Fraunhofer. How to develop "3D Printing" technologies into industrial application

Fraunhofer is one of the world's largest organizations for applied research with a total research budget beyond 2 billion Euros, employing about 23,000 people, most of them educated in the natural sciences and engineering, in 67 different institutes in more than 80 locations worldwide, most of them located in Germany as Fraunhofer's home country. A major portion of Fraunhofer's research budget gets collected from the industry through contract research, giving the Fraunhofer research approach a unique, very much industry-driven and application-oriented color. Fraunhofer research spans across a wide field of areas of expertise-ICT, Life Sciences, Light & Surfaces, Microelectronics, Production, Materials, Defence and Security-and has led to popular products and technologies like the MP3 file format, white LED or high-resolution thermo-cameras. Fraunhofer research has allowed a breakthrough in additive manufacturing (AM) of metal materials, making it possible to fully melt standard metal material selectively for metallic parts with fully dense microstructure and mechanical properties similar to conventional manufacturing routes. A whole new horizon of possible industrial applications had been opened. Today, introduction of additive manufacturing into real industrial environments is becoming more and more into focus, allowing to establish AM as a widely accepted production technology as real industrial "3D printing" (how AM technology is very often referred to, also in an industrial context). In additive manufacturing, Fraunhofer joins its forces within the Fraunhofer Additive Manufacturing Alliance, combining all its institutes who are heavily active in AM research. The alliance is a platform to bring together all of Fraunhofer's AM expertise with the aim to provide expert advice and appropriate solutions on AM application, structuring its activities in four research areas: Engineering, Materials, Technologies and Quality. The plenary speech will show a more detailed look into these research areas and illustrate that with a variety of examples from current research. These examples include RFID embedding into metal AM components, topological optimization of structures for additive manufacturing, a multi-component SLS process, new powder deposition methods for DLS, new FLM printers to process flexible materials including endless fibers, new developments in metal laser deposition technologies and series-production tooling applications.