E³-Produktion. Ultrakurze Prozessketten bewerten und verbessern

The Fraunhofer funded project "E3-Produktion" consists of three emphases (growth and prosperity, individual needs of the people, environmental- and resource issues) of which one again consists of three modules: the development of an innovative and transferable evaluation tool for an entire process chain, several innovative process developments for the tool's application and last but not least a data base to assess and compare process chain alternatives based on individual targets

Increasing resource efficiency with an engineering decision support system for comparison of product design variants

The development of sustainable and resource-efficient products requires consideration of multiple design targets concerning the whole product life cycle. Taking these factors into account leads to complex decision situations with conflicting targets and trade-offs. To support design engineers in these situations an Engineering Decision Support System (EDSS) has been developed. In this article, the overall concept of the EDSS is presented. Furthermore, one function of the EDSS to assist a systematic comparison of product variants is introduced in detail. It is based on combining an existing PLM solutions (in particular Siemens Teamcenter 11/Siemens NX9) and software for Life Cycle Assessment (GaBi 7). Beyond a proof of concept for information exchange between both systems a methodology is presented which enables design engineers to systematically assess and select multiple product variants based on their resource utilization. The approach is complemented with a comprehensive case study for different design options of a core slide. In the scope of this study, variations of geometry (solid vs. hollow design), materials (hot-working steel vs. nickel-based superalloy) and manufacturing processes (laser metal deposition vs. milling) were considered. Furthermore, a usability study of the decision support tool is shown

High-temperature oxidation performance and its mechanism of TiC/Inconel 625 composites prepared by laser metal deposition additive manufacturing

The laser metal deposition (LMD) additive manufacturing process was applied to produce TiC/Inconel 625 composite parts. The high-temperature oxidation performance of the LMD-processed parts and the underlying physical/chemical mechanisms were systematically studied. The incorporation of the TiC reinforcement in the Inconel 625 improved the oxidation resistance of the LMD-processed parts, and the improvement function became more significant with increasing the TiC addition from 2.5wt. % to 5.0 wt. %. The mass gain after 100 h oxidation at 800 degrees C decreased from 1.4130 mg/cm(2) for the LMD-processed Inconel 625 to 0.3233 mg/cm(2) for the LMD-processed Inconel 625/5.0wt. % TiC composites. The oxidized surface of the LMD-processed Inconel 625 parts was mainly consisted of Cr2O3. For the LMD-processed TiC/Inconel 625 composites, the oxidized surface was composed of Cr2O3 and TiO2. The incorporation of the TiC reinforcing particles favored the inherent grain refinement in the LMD-processed composites and, therefore, the composite parts possessed the sound surface integrity after oxidation compared with the Inconel 625 parts under the same oxidation conditions. The LMD-processed TiC/Inconel 625 composites exhibited the excellent oxidation resistance under the oxidation temperature of 800 degrees C. A further increase in the oxidation temperature to 1000 degrees C caused the severe oxidation attack on the composites, due to the unfavorable further oxidation of Cr2O3 to CrO3 at the elevated treatment temperatures