process chain

In the course of digitalization, collaboration between humans and machines is inevitable. This should be considered as early as possible in further training. There’s a major obstacle to this in mechanical engineering: the lack of access to the knowledge needed for success. This can have a negative impact on the acceptance of digitalized processes. A teaching and learning platform teaching digitalization on real machines does important work here.

The increasing awareness of energy-neutral production generates the desire for methods for the energetic evaluation and optimization of process chains. In this context, it is not sufficient to consider only the electrical energy demand along the process chain. Within the scope of this work, a procedure for the holistic energetic evaluation and optimization of process chains in machining was developed, which takes into account cross-material flow interactions by adjusting the process parameters.

The manufacturing share of laser powder bed fusion (L-PBF) increases in industrial application, but still many process steps are manually operated. Additionally, it is not possible to achieve tight dimensional tolerances or low surface roughness. Hence, a process chain has to be set up to combine additive manufacturing (AM) with further machining technologies. To achieve a continuous workpiece flow as basis for further industrialization of L-PBF, the article presents a novel substrate system and its application on L-PBF machines and post-processing. The substrate system consists of a zero-point clamping system and a matrix-like interface of contact pins to be substantially connected to the workpiece within the L-PBF process.

In many industries the success of companies depends on efficient and sustainable processes: In which way higher output can be achieved by less resource consumption? Many process optimization projects improve single processes but not the whole process chain. Thus a high amount of potentials of resource efficiency are unutilized in manufacturing. For realising enormous achievements energy and resource efficiency have to be integrated into the optimization process.

Productivity, quality, flexibility and manufacturing costs are not the only criteria for an effective manufacture. To keep competitiveness, a global optimum of the process chain for the manufacturing of an individual product has to be achieved, considering the existing manufacturing capabilities and innovative technologies. In this paper approaches for integrated technology planning are discussed, which are developed at the Laboratory for Machine Tools and Production Engineering (WZL) in Aachen.