Plastics News Europe - June 2018 - 13

AUTOMOTIVE: ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING

additive parts producer Kegelmann
Technik - with which it is involved in
"joint marketing".
A paper by Kai Kegelmann of
Kegelmann Technik followed Gripp's
paper. Kegelmann stressed the importance of additive manufacturing
for individual items such as spectacles
and medical ankle braces, as well as
providing replacement wheels for
lawnmowers and various washing
machine parts.
Kegelmann referred to innovation
cycles becoming shorter, with associated smaller numbers of parts to be
produced in more versions. But it is
more in other industries, less so in the
automotive industry, where additive
part manufacturing has been more
readily accepted so far, he warned.
"Additive manufacturing has and will
continue to change the market further", Kegelmann predicted.
One company with which Kegelmann works is Evobus in Mannheim,
Germany, the European bus business
unit of automotive OEM Daimler. In a
separate Evobus presentation, Florian

It provides added value in "enabling
parts to be produced from a bed of
PA12 powder that meets the Daimler
DBL5404.02 material specification and
without any tooling required".
As SLS parts have rough surfaces,
Evobus usually performs acetone vapour finishing and/or glass bead
blasting for smoothing, prior to colouring when needed.
Höpfinger admitted Evobus has
only produced matt black and four
"EvoGrau 1-4" grey coloured parts,
both with its special MT8380 grained
surface structure. But this should
change in future with new colours
and surface structures, he advised.
Evobus prefers to sinter white PA12
and colour it than to sinter pre-colour-

ed PA12 powder, as it finds equipment cleaning with colour change
too laborious. Impregnation colouring also preserves the surface grain
better than painting or foil cladding,
Höpfinger said.
Höpfinger ended his presentation
by showing two reference applications, one a design demonstrator
with features such as ribs, holes,
hinges, spring elements and direct
screw retention capability. The other
one was a commercial application: a
bus dashboard container for bank
notes, with integrated clips, hinges,
cover, grip, easily sintered with different numbers of slots for the bank
notes and with or without a lock
function.

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Highest flexibility, suitable for a wide
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From mono to 11 layer lines
Fastest purging
Evobus provides laser sintered
bank note boxes for bus
dashboard customisation

Höpfinger, a design engineer at Evobus, talked about the added value
that additive manufactured parts provide in meeting customer individual
demands.
Höpfinger said, "more than 90%
of all bus orders consist of at least
one specific customer wish to be fulfilled". Additive manufacturing, he
noted, has progressed from simple
rapid prototyping, through tooling to
direct manufacturing, firstly in medicine, aerospace and private sector
consumer goods, and now also for
the automotive industry.
Evobus has responded accordingly
with its own business unit dedicated to
"providing parts for customer vehicles"
[buses]. Evobus makes such parts with
just selective laser sintering (SLS) so far.

JUNE 2018

FOR
Y
M
FIL QUALIT N
T
A
V IO
WITH INNO E.
AND FUTUR

+ 49 821 5906-0 / plastics@alpine.hosokawa.com

13

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Plastics News Europe - June 2018
