Why we drive the industrialization of Additive Manufacturing

This year’s TCT show will start in Birmingham in on September 25th, 2018. The international event that focuses on Additive Manufacturing, design and engineering technology offers the perfect platform for our company and our 3D printing specialist subsidiary Materials Solutions – A Siemens Business to discuss some of our latest ideas and use cases with an expert audience.

One of our Additive Manufacturing use cases that we’ll present at this year’s TCT is our Ruston Car. The Ruston Car is a perfect example for reverse engineering manufacturing an automotive steering box using 3D printing technology. This demonstrates how new technologies help tackling tasks that seemed almost unsolvable using conventional approaches. What makes the new Ruston Car that special?

The Ruston Car was originally designed by the British Ruston & Hornsby Ltd. in 1918. The cars were very well manufactured but also very heavy and relatively expensive. Therefore, they couldn’t compete with the lighter and cheaper models made by other established car producers at this time. So production ended in 1925 after roughly 1,500 cars had been sold.

In the late 1940's, Ruston & Hornsby started developing and manufacturing industrial gas turbines, and in 2003 it became a subsidiary of our company called Siemens Industrial Turbomachinery Ltd. In 2018, 100 years after the Ruston Car was born. Two of the Ruston cars are still owned by Siemens at our Lincoln site. They’ve undergone extensive restoration, initially performed by an enthusiastic team of apprentices.

Unfortunately the ongoing restoration process hit a wall when the steering box in one of the cars sustained significant damage and fell into several pieces. The first problem was that we didn’t have the original drawings, and the second was that a conventional one-off production of the box would be very costly.

Creating Additive Manufacturing knowledge by pushing limits

Faced with these challenges, we had the great idea to use our Siemens Additive Manufacturing knowledge to reverse engineer the steering box. We used the latest scanning technology to digitally “glue the parts back together” creating a working scan model that could be 3D printed. Our expert team from Materials Solutions took over using their experience of reverse engineering. It took just five days to rebuild the hundred year old steering box more accurately than using the original, conventional manufacturing processes and more robust, because it’s engineered as a single piece.

The result is a working vintage car nearly 100 years after its initial production: The latest Additive Manufacturing technology brought the car back to life and onto the road again. During a summer fest at the Lincoln site in mid-August, the car was exhibited and admired by the audience.

Creating value by performing end-to-end processes

The in-depth knowledge of our Materials Solutions team that helped restore the Ruston Car will also serve them well solving efficiently complex customer challenges from aerospace, automotive, motorsport and other industries. As the Ruston Car shows, the difficulty and the resulting value lie not simply in the 3D-printing skills but also in performing the entire process. Reverse engineering starts with understanding the task and creating working ideas, it continues with selecting the right material and optimizing printing, and it ends with the post processing. Our new state-of-the-art Materials Solutions factory, which will be opened in December 2018, will offer this entire digital end-to-end chain.

The new factory in Worcester (Lincolnshire, UK) will help us realize our vision for an Additive Manufacturing factory where the industrialization of this technology is already set. It will employ many of the latest digital factory and Additive Manufacturing technologies, including end-to-end PLM chain and MindSphere, Siemens cloud-based, open IoT operating system connecting products, factories, systems, and machines with data analytics. In addition to the factory’s capabilities, Materials Solutions will expand its offerings from part-printing to include engineering services.

Creating broader acceptance by sharing experiences

We are already using our comprehensive end-to-end Additive Manufacturing knowledge within our power generation business for more than ten years. We’ve acquired 100,000 hours of proven operational experience with 3D-printed gas turbine parts in fully operational power plants, and we want to share this experience with our customers from other industries.

I believe that we can trigger a broader market acceptance by sharing our experiences and lessons learned. Power generation isn’t the largest application for Additive Manufacturing, though. If we can generate excitement in the aerospace and automotive industries, the sheer number of applications will drive more demand and bring costs down due to the further industrialization of Additive Manufacturing.

Driving cross-industry partnerships, I’m certain that this will produce a faster market pull. We believe that we have lower barriers to entry and can help speed adoption. Our proven experience of serialized parts in commercial operation can help us qualify and release additive manufactured parts, with process and quality controls and parts certification in place, not only within aerospace .

The 100 year old Ruston Car to help speed adoption

We have experience in finding unusual solutions, ramping up processes and driving productivity, and we have proven experience in using Additive Manufacturing. The combination of these experiences, our lower barriers to entry, and cross-industry collaboration will help speed up adoption of this advanced technology to customers from other industries.

What do you think is the best way to speed up adoption and industrialization of Additive Manufacturing for challenging applications? I’m looking forward to receiving your feedback.