ADDI-OPTIMISE - Process Efficiency & Quality Assurance in Metal Additive Manufacturing

ended

Croom Precision Medical (CPM) is an SME with over 35 years’ experience in partnering with global healthcare and aerospace companies as an outsourced manufacturing service of high precision components and medical devices. The overall goal of this ADDI-OPTIMISE project is to achieve a significant step change in the quality and yield of regulated components produced by metal Additive Manufacturing (AM) and as a result to deliver enhanced cost competitiveness. CPM wants to capitalise on our existing practical know-how to develop new services for application in its own business but also as a service to other European AM businesses. When evaluating the metallic AM process in a regulated medical, aerospace or automotive production settings, there is significant process flow challenges in place which requests high value metallic volatile material enter multiple environments for sieving, cleaning and recycling. This introduces multiple opportunities for hazard and material contamination from foreign particles. The competitive advantage for this project and its innovation will be realised by the ability to translate advanced technology, in-situ process monitoring information, post-processing and validation into superior product performance, reduced process waste and improved lead times against current AM processes. The output of the project will provide a robust platform that will allow us to develop multiple product lines and services to meet the needs of a rapidly developing sector. We have a vision of accelerating the uptake of additive manufacturing and disruptive technologies from the SME right through to the multinational in a bid to meet market demands in the highly regulated aerospace and medical fields. Additive Manufacturing or 3D printing in metals is disrupting these global market segments at an accelerating pace where new approaches and engineering challenges are presented for part quality, system validation and process control.