3D printing technology has made significant progress in recent years and will play an important role in component manufacturing in the future. In the beginning, mainly prototypes or special applications were printed, but today small series are already being produced with 3D printers. In order to enable high-quality series production in the future, the ACR institutes OFI, ZFE and IWI are researching basic principles for the design and optimization of 3D-printed series components in close cooperation with suppliers of 3D printing processes.

Components from the 3D printer behave differently than injection molded parts, for example. The differences lie primarily in the material properties and in the processing-related morphology. How these parameters affect the dimensioning and long-term behavior of the components is being investigated by the strategic SERIFE-3D project, funded by the Federal Ministry for Digitalization and Economic Location.

The aim is to be able to create a guideline for economical and quality-assured product development based on the knowledge gained in the research project. Since there is already a trend towards 3D-printed series components, an additional service offering will be created in order to be able to provide individual support, especially to SMEs, in the design of such components even after the end of the project. OFI has already been successfully offering a similar service for injection-molded plastic components for years.