spare parts production

Spare parts for older products are often difficult to obtain or cannot be produced in an economically viable way using conventional manufacturing techniques. This article examines whether damping elements for gearbox bearings (in/for the automotive sector) can be manufactured from thermoplastic polyurethanes (TPU) with the same or compatible properties as the original part alternatively using additive manufacturing.

The “IT’S DIGITIVE” research project developed the prerequisites for collaborative and platform-supported processing of additive manufacturing-based services and thus important building blocks for an additive manufacturing-based service network. The focus was on intellectual property protection and the development of secure and trustworthy order fulfillment processes. Based on the identified inherent risks and threats in this distributed order processing, appropriate security countermeasures were developed using two use cases as examples and implemented as demonstrators.