On Thursday, February 7, 2019, Additive Industries announced the finalists of Additive World Design for Additive Manufacturing Challenge 2019. From a group of 121 contestants, both professionals and students, 3 finalists were selected per category. “The redesigns submitted from all over the world and across different fields like automotive, aerospace, medical, tooling, and high tech, demonstrated how product designs can be improved when the freedom of additive manufacturing is applied. This year again we saw major focus on the elimination of conventional manufacturing difficulties, minimization of assembly and lowering logistical costs. There are also interesting potential business cases within both categories’ says Daan Kersten, CEO of Additive Industries.
This year, in the professional category, Carbon Performance Limited (the UK) shows how the hyperperformance suspension upright, one of the most critical load bearing components of the sport car, can get a 30% weight reduction, in contrast to any conventional upright, by using topology optimisation. Another professional, K3D from the Netherlands, improved the performance of the old design of the cutting dough knife (food tech), which is attached to a robot, by optimising it for additive manufacturing. Besides solving such problems as stickiness of the dough during the cutting process and uneven depth of each cut, K3D also manages to save up to 90% of the weight & reduce the production price by using the redesigned additive manufactured dough knife. The third finalist of the professional category, Mr. Kartheek Raghu, from the Indian company Wipro3D, redesigned the conventional design of a Cold Finger thermal trap for a sublimation process. The cold trap is a device that condenses all vapours, except the permanent gases into a liquid or solid. The redesign contains fine lattice structure that holds cryogenic temperature for longer and therefore improves performance.
The finalists from the student category had interesting redesigns this year as well. Two students from Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), with their “Brake Caliper” (automotive application) optimised the part design for the challenge and managed to reduce the weight by 2.61kg, which is a 35% weight reduction of the overall part. Abraham Mathew from the McMaster University (Canada) introduced his Topography Optimized Cubesat Propellant Tank (space industry) to improve the stiffness of thin walled parts by modifying surface features without increasing wall thickness and consequently mass. The third finalist in the student category, Obasogie Okpamen from the Landmark University (Nigeria) achieved the mass and material reduction in his version of the “Twin Spark Connecting Rod” through topology optimization.
This year we have two honourable mentions in the professional category. The first honourable mention is last year’s winner of the professional category, Aidro Hydraulics & 3D Printing (Italy) with their Unibody Hydraulic System. The additive manufacturing benefits utilized are the option to produce highly complex internal and external geometries and the possibility to design a part based on its core functional purposes, not on the restrictions and limitations of subtractive manufacturing technologies. Another honourable mention is for the Contirod-Düse from Nina Uppenkam, SMS Group GmbH (Germany). In comparison to the conventional CONTIROD® Nozzle, the new AM design is a monolithic design and requires only 35 mm of space compared to previous 65 mm, it weighs 0.85 kg instead of 2.5 kg. The nozzle no longer consists of six parts, but only one part, so that the preassembly and adjustment of nozzle before installation into the plant is eliminated.
