Our institute leadership on AM trends, challenges and the DNA of the Fraunhofer IAPT

Frank Beckmann: Ingo has established a culture of participation. Department heads, group heads and future field heads have been given considerable flexibility in helping to shape the institute and lead their field to success. That means both freedom and responsibility.

Prof. Ingomar Kelbassa: It is all about flat hierarchies and an openness to discussion. I want to encourage everyone to become involved not only in defining the topics for this institution, but also in human interaction. Call it New Work or Empowerment – it has helped us to maintain and even expand selectively our expertise and know-how, both qualitatively and quantitatively, despite staff turnover and a shortage of skilled workers. At the moment, we still lack growth, but we have been able to consolidate our position and, in particular, increase our industrial relevance.

Frank Beckmann: The institute has become more strictly focused on the industrialization of AM production routes for societally relevant end user fields. We succeeded in realizing significantly larger industrial projects. Today, our focus is less on the quantity of projects and more on the quality and size of individual industrial projects. In this context, we also meet our external partners and clients on an equal footing.

Prof. Ingomar Kelbassa: Regardless of whether it is a public client, such as the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action or, in the university environment, the German Research Foundation, a student or – as in the original sense of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft – a client from industry: We take all challenges seriously and offer industrial solutions. As a team, we want to shape the future together. It is crucial not only to retain the utilization in the field of 3D printing and AM production routes in Germany, but to explicitly increase our competitive position. The added value of AM in the industrial environment needs to be generated, created and exported worldwide from Germany.

Prof. Ingomar Kelbassa: AM is a digital production technology. You can take CAD data, slice it into different layers, translate it through the post processor and send it to the plant. Then, you create the product by pushing a button. If AM allows every end user and also every consumer to become a manufacturer themselves – in other words, to become a so-called prosumer: To whom do you still sell your know-how and expertise? This is effectively a conversion of a traditional, product-driven sales approach to a purely digital business model.

Frank Beckmann: If we take this even further, each CAD file can be printed an unlimited number of times. Therefore, you actually want to sell the right to print this data only once. For this purpose, for instance, we develop digital solutions – security solutions based on blockchain and so on.

Not only do we provide our clients from the industry with technological know-how, but also with business insights and ideas: How can you produce a component in the fastest and most cost-effective way? To whom do you sell it then and how?

Prof. Ingomar Kelbassa: Thanks to our holistic view of industrial value chains, we are one step ahead of companies such as KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers or McKinsey. Our understanding of technology and business enables us to anticipate the questions of the future and deliver tomorrow‘s answers already today.

Frank Beckmann: In our current four future fields: This is where we address topics such as security and defense and thus, for instance, the changed security situation since February 2022. The life science future field addresses demographic change as a major societal challenge. And in addition to the energy future field, we are also involved with mobility. This is something we can do particularly well in Hamburg – on land, on water, in the air.

Prof. Ingomar Kelbassa: Located in the Hamburg metropolitan region, we are in a unique location worldwide: We have the overseas port here. We have the Deutsche Bahn here. We have automotive manufacturing here. With Airbus and Lufthansa Technik, we have aerospace companies and even aeronautics companies. This is complemented by cooperations with non-university research institutions such as Leibniz or Helmholtz and DESY. Next come university partners, starting with the TU Hamburg and the Helmut Schmidt University of the Federal Armed Forces to the HAW and the University of Hamburg. We have everything here to create a beacon of industrialization of AM manufacturing routes. In my opinion, there is no other site in the world that can offer this!

Prof. Ingomar Kelbassa: To me personally, AM is not yet a key technology, but is well on its way to becoming one. The problem is that Germany and Europe do not yet see AM as a key technology of the future. China and the USA have already realized this and are closely on our heels here. We at Fraunhofer IAPT call for expanding recycling opportunities in Europe and especially in Germany with German and European partners, and for not relinquishing market leadership to China or the USA.

As a high-wage country, we can only maintain our market leadership in manufacturing and production if we are simply faster than everyone else with our innovations. We must not allow ourselves, as a national economy, to be faced again with a situation in which groundbreaking technologies are invented in Germany but not innovated and commercialized in Germany: There must be no more Transrapid 2.0, no more Photovoltaics 2.0, no more OLED 2.0. It is our modest contribution to enable our industry to profitably bring AM into value creation through production. This is our mission.

Frank Beckmann: We also have major initiatives underway. We are looking at how to make the AM production route more sustainable. What are the leverages? Where are the main CO₂ emission sources or the points where we are not yet optimally on track? We measure this in order to optimize the process chain in the second step.

The other and greater leverage can be found in the products: They save immense resources over their life cycle. For instance, a lightweight component in the aviation industry saves an enormous amount of kerosene and thus has an even greater leverage than the process chain. There are various examples for this.

Ingo, for instance, looks back on an extensive history in the field of gas turbines. Here we are currently burning natural gas, in particular ergo methane, in other words CH₄. Such turbines would no longer be feasible with conventional casting production routes.

Prof. Ingomar Kelbassa: When it comes to the hydrogen economy and the (re)electrification of hydrogen, it is important to be able to flexibly (co)combust hydrogen H₂ or ammonia NH₃. Hydrogen burns at temperatures about 200 Kelvin higher than natural gas. A modern gas turbine simply cannot withstand this in terms of thermomechanics. Which means engineers have to redesign or reconstruct the entire fuel gas path – from the combustion chamber to the first two high-pressure turbine stages – and then represent these new components in terms of manufacturing technology: This can no longer be done without AM.

Frank Beckmann: In any case, we need to move away from stand-alone technology, where a plant somewhere singularly produces prototypes or individual parts, and towards full integration into factory structures. Furthermore, Additive Manufacturing is still in part a fairly manual and less automated manufacturing route. Our plans for the new building include fully automated, end-to-end process chains for plastics and metal – both physically and in the digital process chain.

Prof. Ingomar Kelbassa: The trend is clearly toward virtualization. You could otherwise only optimize individual process steps autonomously and not the complete AM production route, that is, end-to-end. The second major trend is definitely automation. And the third trend has to be resilience: Meaning that we not only look at the horizontal process chain from design to the finished end product, but also at the CO₂ footprint of the product life cycle. And that we resiliently grow the supply chain with tier one and tier two, independent of third countries.

We must be able to carry out everything ourselves on site – from raw material production to the finished end product, including MRO (editor‘s note: Maintenance Repair Overall) of the component and all the way to recycling.

As part of our IAMHH® initiative, two of three pilot projects are dedicated to building a resilient AM infrastructure on site. First, a Germany-wide end-to-end representation – meaning from the design to the finished end product including life cycle. In the second project, we even map the complete life cycle locally on the Hamburg city area. We intend to demonstrate the whole thing for two materials, Germany-wide for metal, locally in Hamburg for plastic.

I believe that once this success story has been written, it motivates us to move in the direction of decentralized, automated production. Needless to say, the motivation is significantly higher if you can show at the same time: You need significantly less raw material to create this product with the production of components using an AM production route. And you need significantly less energy. Ultimately, in a benchmark comparison with any type of conventional production, the AM production route is potentially even the most sustainable solution in terms of its CO₂ footprint, and the most cost-effective as well.

When productivity has been demonstrated, every manufacturing company in the world will at least look at AM, use AM as a complement to conventional manufacturing or even switch to AM altogether. That is where we are heading: Towards »green manufacturing« with AM.