Development of an Open Platform for multi-material Additive Manufacturing

The emerging Multi-Material Additive Manufacturing (MMAM) represents a new paradigm for the design, functionality, and cost effectiveness of high value products, making sub-parts of different materials in one build without the need for further assembly and allowing the potential to improve part performance by varying materials within the build layers. Currently, issues such as recyclability problems with powder beds, and low material loadings in inkjet processes need to be overcome to work with multiple materials. OPAM will address these challenges by developing and optimising two TRL4 next-generation multi-material AM technologies developed by partners – Dry Powder Printing hybridised with powder bed fusion, and Electrostatic JET printing, bringing them to TRL6 and optimising the key materials formats and properties. We will demonstrate and validate the new technologies with a set of commercially-directed case studies to showcase the flexibility, speed and cost effectiveness of the new MMAM techniques. The case studies will cover conductive and semi conductive composite inks, physical and physicochemical bonding of materials with overlapping temperatures for melt-processing & decomposition and biomimetic structures using combined stiff/soft metal/polymer structures, with embedded sensors. Commercial end users and supply chain stakeholders are included in the consortium to specify and direct the project’s outputs towards meeting industrial needs from the outset. OPAM will systematically capture the process knowledge on multi materials compatibility, surface joining methods and consolidation processes and combine these into an open Knowledge Based Engineering platform to be extended to all MMAM techniques. OPAM`s outputs will allow the manufacturing of products that simply cannot be made by other methods, with increased efficiency of up to 70% and product manufacturing cost will reduced by up to 60%.