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23 januari 2020

Royal Dutch Army: Increasing adaptability on the battlefield with 3D printing

The Royal Dutch Army is heavily focused on innovation. The Additive Manufacturing Expertise Center (AMEC) in Leusden is the coordinator of 3D printing at the Ministry of Defense. The goal of this center is to coordinate AM roadmaps and increase awareness and applications of 3D printing in the military. That’s why the Royal Dutch Army asked Additive Center to run the Application Program for their teams.

Together with Gerben Fokkink, Projectleader Additive Manufacturing at the Dutch Army, we specified a custom program. The goal: Create awareness on the possibilities, Train personnel on the most important 3D printing technologies and identify realistic use cases to increase adaptability and improve deployability. The program contained interactive workshops, challenged the engineers to see new opportunities and identified concepts that are possible today. During the program multiple experts of Additive Center were present for in-depth expertise on both Metal and Polymer 3D printing.

Military use cases, trained engineers and awareness

The group identified around 20 use-cases because of the interactive approach we use. Based on the found use cases the necessary knowledge was provided to understand feasibility of the concept. Using our Additive Application Canvas we finalized things by clearly framing the opportunity, technology, benefits and challenges.

On a mission: 3D printing

After the succes of the program, the Royal Dutch Army expanded their efforts focused on developing 3D printed application that help troops to be more adaptive in the field.

Gerben now recommends to expand awareness on the possibilities of Additive Manufacturing next to conventional production methods: “Every engineer should be aware of what is possible with metal and polymer 3D printing nowadays. As the Royal Dutch Army we should gather our country wide experience on this technology and make it available to our men and women battling in the field. This way we give them additional tools to cope with changing environments, create safer missions and provide them with the tools to be more effective. “

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CNC vs Additive Manufacturing _ 3D printing

5 november 2019

Burgaflex explores 3D printing for Automotive

additivecenter Geen categorie

Using industrial 3D printing Burgaflex creates better products and is able to offer a more flexible and fast service towards their automotive customers.

Burgaflex is a world player in producing tube, fitting and hose assemblies for the automotive industry. With many big and exclusive automotive customers Burgaflex excels in high quality and flexible production services with short lead-times. As part of their ongoing quest to deliver better products, Burgaflex decided to focus their efforts on identifying and developing 3D printed applications and production tooling.

Producing better products, more flexibly

Burgaflex already used 3D printing in production to improve the process. By printing various tools and jigs they were able to increase the quality of products and increase the production speed. But they knew this was just the start. After seeing 3D printed parts in metal Burgaflex realized this could potentially be a big opportunity for themselves as well as their customers. That was the starting point of a collaboration with Additive Center. In a series of workshops Additive Center experts collaborated with the Burgaflex team. We shared relevant inspirational case studies, challenged them to think differently and trained the team on basic Additive Manufacturing skills. This resulted in 15+ applications identified all with potential to improve the business. Using Additive Center’s expertise on industrial 3D printing a selection of the applications were developed further and printed using industrial 3D printers in both plastic and metal.

Additive Center Expert Rein van der Mast together with a group of Burgaflex experts in the midst of a creative session.

Burgaflex, Automotive and 3D printing.

The Burgaflex team committed themselves to take the next steps. Through careful collaboration Additive Center has redesigned 2 of their existing products, shown below. The redesigns will be showcased at the AgriTechnica trade fair, world’s leading trade fair for agricultural machinery. As General Manager Burgaflex Jeroen van Nederkassel said: “We analyzed the potential impact of these case studies and concluded that they have the potential to enable the production of small series cost effectively. Next to this, it will help our customers to improve the performance of their hose assemblies and battery cooling systems while decreasing the complexity of the parts and its supply chain. We look forward to collaborating with our customers to validate the applications and set our customers up for success.”