Fleksibel Additive tilvirkning for krevende komponenter innenfor Maritim sektor

The project FlexiMan is an industrial-driven research project aiming to redesign the production process chain of existing maritime components. The main target of the project is to increase the competitiveness of European manufacturing supply by enabling new competitive designs and materials and reducing lead time and environmental impacts. The new manufacturing approaches developed in the project represent a disruptive renewal of old thought concepts from manufacturing and have a focus on sustainability. They are based on optimized applications of Additive Manufacturing - Directed Energy Deposition (DED) technologies in the production process chains of maritime components. The DED manufacturing has an added value for medium and large size maritime components due to the high deposition speed and reduced manufacturing time compared to other AM technologies. The project succeeds to demonstrate the developed manufacturing approaches on three maritime components, namely water jet impeller, lightweight propeller blade, and multi-material pump impeller. These components have strict requirements on design and material properties. The DED manufacturing approaches were optimised for each component targeting the requirements and specifications. The optimisation procedure establishes a link between the DED manufacturing process and the achieved properties. It is based on the understanding of the effects of process parameters on the material's microstructure and material properties. Material testing and advanced material characterisations were performed to support the optimisation approach and to build knowledge for further exploitation of DED technology in accordance with the standard requirements. A small scale recycling facility for grinding waste was installed to produce environmentally friendly raw material for DED. The results show great potential, but highlight challenging technical questions related to scaling up of the technology. The project FlexiMan was supported by the European cooperation ERA-NET MarTERA, involving international collaboration between leading companies and research institutes of maritime technologies from Norway and Germany. The project consortium demonstrated innovative collaboration, where the project results answer challenging research questions and pave the way for future exploitation of DED in maritime supply industry.

FlexiMan is supported by the European cooperation ERA-NET MarTERA, involving international collaboration between companies and research institutes in Norway and Germany. The results of FlexiMan have substantial contribution to the overall objectives of ERA-NET in the MarTERA Research Area, Advanced manufacturing and production. FlexiMan developed innovative manufacturing approaches based on DED and demonstrated their impacts on enhancing the performance and reducing lead time and cost. In addition, recycling process of metal grinding waste was investigated to enable low-cost and environmentally friendly raw materials for DED process. The aim is to improve sustainability and reduce environmental impact of maritime industry. The results of FlexiMan contribute to build Knowledge on suppling maritime customers with critical requirements and paves the way for future exploitation in maritime supply industry. The developed manufacturing approach promote local production in Europe by demonstrating the competitiveness of local supply chains (OEM and DED suppliers) to improve the resilience of European manufacturing industry. The developed DED manufacturing approaches and the distributive supply chain are demonstrated for the maritime sector, but they can be exploited by other sectors with similar requirements such as energy and offshore supply industry, where the suppliers of components and spare parts might be stakeholders. The project results can also be exploited by the manufacturing industry of metals in general for any industrial applications.

Additive Manufacturing (AM) is key to the transformation of the European industry towards future-oriented, digitally integrated, competitive and sustainable production processes. Although AM promises a high potential for the maritime sector, industrial integration has so far been hampered by technical, economical and procedural hurdles: Unresolved material scientific questions of the nautical sector, the manufacturing challenges in the generation of large-volume components, and the complex certification of products and process chains within safety-critical applications are among the many points that need to be addressed. The FlexiMan project addresses Direct Energy Deposition (DED) techniques. Among the AM methods, these have, by far, the greatest capability for maritime applications. Due to the flexible process management under local inert gas atmosphere combined with very high build-up rates, even large components such as propellers or pump housings can be addressed. In the same way, these processes are ideal for multi-material applications such as the deposition of wear coatings. A further advantage of the DED process is the promising combination with conventional manufacturing techniques such as casting. This so-called Hybrid Manufacturing (HM) presents a disruptive renewal of old thought concepts from production and is a key aspect of this project. The FlexiMan project aims to completely redesign the existing manufacturing chains for three concrete nautical applications, enhancing their product functionality and reducing lead time and cost by 40 %. For this purpose, leading companies and institutes of the Maritime and AM sectors from Norway and Germany have joined forces to form a powerful alliance. The strong project focus on process and product qualification guarantees a successfully industrial implementation. Besides this, the recycling of metal waste to valuable AM raw material powder will be investigated to improve efficiency of Maritime circular economy.