Steffen G. Scholz

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology | KIT · Institute for Automation and Applied Informatics

As additive manufacturing has evolved, 3D inkjet printing (IJP) has become a promising alternative manufacturing method able to manufacture functional multi-material parts in a single process. However, issues with part quality in terms of dimensional errors and lack of precision still restrict its industrial and commercial applications. This study...

The aim of this project is to demonstrate a proof of concept by using Additive Manufacturing (AM) technology in order to demonstrate its viability for the production of tailor-made components with regions of varying (higher and lower) hardness and surface roughness within a single part. In order to do this, first a test piece is designed and printe...

Metal parts produced by additive manufacturing often require post processing to meet the specifications of the final product, which can make the process chain long and complex. Laser post processes can be a valuable addition to conventional finishing methods. Laser polishing, specifically, is proving to be a great asset in improving the surface qua...

While additive manufacturing is already applied in industry in different varieties, even simple and widespread techniques such as the fused filament fabrication (FFF) process are still not fully understood in terms of influence of printing parameters or part orientation on the quality of fabricated parts. A main issue for using FFF in a reliable ma...

This book consists of peer-reviewed papers, presented at the International Conference on Sustainable Design and Manufacturing (SDM 2021). Leading-edge research into sustainable design and manufacturing aims to enable the manufacturing industry to grow by adopting more advanced technologies and at the same time improve its sustainability by reducing...

Dross formation is a phenomenon that is observed while printing metallic components using Laser Powder Bed Fusion (L-PBF) and occurring primarily at down-facing surfaces that are unsupported and suffer inadequate heat removal. Naturally, dross formation causes dimensional inaccuracy, high surface roughness and also adversely affects the mechanical...

According to the Industry 4.0 vision, humans in a smart factory, should be equipped with formidable and seamless communication capabilities and integrated into a cyber-physical system (CPS) that can be utilized to monitor and recognize human activity via artificial intelligence (e.g., deep learning). Recent advances in the accuracy of deep learning...

This paper reports on the development of a detection and recognition-based computer vision algorithm of features in transparent polymer parts. In particular , transparent polymer parts fabricated by a 3D inkjet printing process with different features from a few millimeters down to a sub-millimeter range are used for validation of the proposed algo...

As additive manufacturing has evolved, 3D inkjet printing (IJP) has become a promising alternative manufacturing method able to manufacture functional multi-material parts in a single process. However, issues with part quality in terms of dimensional errors and lack of precision still restrict its industrial and commercial applications. This study...

Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies are creating pathways for a digital transition in manufacturing and the Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF) process remains the most promising and successful technology in this regard. This has inspired research and development efforts to further capabilities and to push the state of the art in order to open up e...

Smart factory in the era of Industry 4.0 requires humans to have continuous communication capabilities among each other's and with the existing smart assets in order to integrate their activities into a cyber-physical system (CPS) within the smart factory. Machine learning (ML) algorithms can help precisely recognize the human activities, provided...

The dawn of mainstream electric vehicles is here, with almost all major automotive manufacturers now offering fully electric alternatives to traditional internal combustion-based cars. This is in alignment with major trends in sustainability in today’s world where a reduction in the usage of fossil fuels and other fossil fuel-dependent technologies...

Down-facing surfaces are one of the most challenging features in metal parts produced by laser powder bed fusion (LPBF). A combination of reasons, primary of which are residual stresses and overheating cause these features to have the worst surface finish and dimensional accuracy of all LPBF surfaces. In order to examine this phenomenon, a Design o...

In early 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic revealed massive shortages in short term supply of personal protective equipment. Drastically rising demands, panic buying, and disruption of established global supply chains in some countries, including Germany, resulted in a need for quick, innovative and easy to apply solutions. A coalition of enthusiastic mak...

This book consists of peer-reviewed papers, presented at the International Conference on Sustainable Design and Manufacturing (SDM 2020). Leading-edge research into sustainable design and manufacturing aims to enable the manufacturing industry to grow by adopting more advanced technologies and at the same time improve its sustainability by reducing...

The domain of additive manufacturing is an ever-growing sphere of research that will soon make its mark in innumerable industrial applications. The prowess of additive manufacturing increases significantly when it is integrated along with the Internet of Things. Upon connecting a Prusa MK3S 3D printer to a Raspberry Pi 3B and operating it via Octop...

This paper presents a concept for an integrated process chain for tooling production based on metal additive manufacturing. The proposed approach aims at taking advantage of a fully digitized production line, describing the main steps for the synergetic integration of the manufacturing assets. The production line entails digital infrastructure that...

The IoT solutions for health informatics are suffering from restriction of using one frequency which makes the network is unable to communicate via different frequencies. Also, this limitation of using a single frequency fixes a single communication range between nodes without the capability to vary the covering rang. This could consume high power...

Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies have recently gained significance amongst industries as well as everyday consumers. This is largely due to the benefits that they offer in terms of design freedom, lead-time reduction, mass-customization as well as potential sustainability improvements due to efficiency in resource usage. However, convention...

Nonplanar 3D printing is a recently emerged approach to increase surface quality and part strength in additive manufacturing. In this paper, the impact of a nonplanar printing method utilized for the fused filament fabrication (FFF) technique on the resultant surface roughness of printed parts is presented. In particular, the influence of different...

Since the late 90s, the way companies acquire novel ideas and bring resulting products to the market is in a paradigm shift moving towards open innovation concepts and making use of crowd-based approaches. This in particular affects the industrial technologies sector with its fast-moving advancements in the areas of Additive Manufacturing, Micro- a...

The eruption of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) (corona virus disease, COVID-19) in Wuhan, China, and its global spread has led to an exponentially growing number of infected patients, currently exceeding over 6.6 million and over 390,000 deaths as of the 5th of June 2020. In this pandemic situation, health systems...

The domain of additive manufacturing is an ever-growing sphere of research that will soon make its mark in innumerable industrial applications. The prowess of additive manufacturing increases significantly when it is integrated along with the Internet of Things. Upon connecting a Prusa MK3S 3D printer to a Raspberry Pi 3B and operating it via Octop...

This article reports on the investigation of the effects of process parameters and their interactions on as-built part quality and resource-efficiency of the fused filament fabrication 3D printing process. In particular, the influence of five process parameters: infill percentage, layer thickness, printing speed, printing temperature, and surface i...

The rise in popularity of Additive Manufacturing technologies and their increased adoption for manufacturing have created a requirement for their fast development and maturity. However, there is still room for improvement when compared with conventional manufacturing in terms of the predictability, quality, and robustness. Statistical analysis has...

Injection moulding is a well-established replication process for the cost-effective manufacture of polymer-based components. The process has different applications in fields such as medical, automotive and aerospace. To expand the use of polymers to meet growing consumer demands for increased functionality, advanced injection moulding processes hav...

SMARTLAM is a European funded research project, intended to develop a modular manufacturing platform and capability database, for three-dimensional integration/manufacturing of component parts constructed from laminated polymer films. To enable communication/interaction between SMARTLAM integrated manufacturing modules and the capability database,...

Laser-based powder bed fusion (L-PBF) is one of the AM techniques that has continued to gain an increased market acceptance and penetration, particularly in a wide range of industrial applications that include automotive, aerospace, medical/dental and robotics. However, in spite of its unstoppable rise in popularity, the L-PBF process still poses s...

The growing rise of popularity of Additive Manufacturing technologies and its increased adoption for manufacturing has created a requirement for its fast development and maturity. However, it still lags far behind conventional manufacturing in terms of predictability, quality and robustness. Statistical modelling has proven to be an excellent tool...

This paper reports on an experiment-based investigation into the effect of different process parameters on the performance of the FDM process. In particular, the influence of five process parameters, namely infill percentage, layer thickness, printing speed, printing temperature and surface inclination angle, were examined and the resultant surface...

The SMARTLAM project proposes a new paradigm of modular, flexible, scalable 3D-Integration (3D-I) scenarios for 3D manufacturing of microsystems out of laminated polymer films. During the integration of discrete parts and laminated polymer sheets, a fast and precise vision system is needed to inspect the top layer of functional elements and align l...

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis is an important tool to estimate total costs incurred for Additive Manufacturing (AM) over the time of the useful life from the purchaser’s perspective. Thus, the paper on hand describes the application of the TCO model to different state of the art Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) machines. The application of...

Although additive manufacturing (AM) has offered proven ability to reduce waste when compared with traditional manufacturing techniques, however, AM processes such as fused filament fabrication (FFF) still poses some negative environmental and economic aspects in terms of generated waste. This waste comes from rafts, supports, or bases that are par...

This paper presents a safe-by-design approach developed for enhanced inks containing nanomaterials for 3D inkjet printing. Manufactured nanomaterials, like aluminium oxides and zirconium dioxide, are increasingly used for additive manufacturing today. However, the impact and interaction of nanomaterials on human health and the environment are widel...

In addition to a wide range of commercially available data processing tools for data analysis and knowledge discovery, there are a bundle of Unix-shell scripting and text processing tools practically available on every computer. This paper reports on some of these data processing tools and presents how they can be used together to manipulate and tr...

Featured Application: This paper presents the first investigations towards closed loop feedback control of the selective laser melting (SLM) process. Insight gained from this work can be applied to facilitate in-process optimization of the SLM process for maximizing part quality and minimizing surface roughness. Abstract: Additive manufacturing pr...

The paper presents an interactive graphical environment, which enables the detection and graphical visualization of concepts in a document or a document collection. Concepts are expressed by (multiple) entities extracted from the document and by the relationships between them. The tool offers an entity-centered view, which graphically shows the mos...

Injection moulding (IM) is a well-established manufacturing process for cost-effective replication of polymer-based components. Advanced IM processes have been developed; modifying the final polymer part produced to create microcellular structures. Through the creation of microcellular materials, not only can the final weight be reduced but also, t...

Modern cyber manufacturing has been introduced into a broad range of manufacturing processes to ease their digital reconfigurability and enhance flexibility while retaining a high throughput of quality products. Such a system provides real-time data acquisition, enabling monitoring of the actual condition of the manufacturing process. The Industria...

This paper reports the results of an experimental investigation into the ablation of cobalt-bound tungsten carbide and aluminium oxide ceramic, two so-called super-composite materials, using a nanosecond pulsed laser. The ablation of single trenches was performed for different scan speeds and laser fluence. The ablation process was assessed in term...

Additive manufacturing provides a number of benefits in terms of a large freedom to design complex parts and reduced lead-times while globally reducing the size of supply chains as it brings all production processes under one roof. However, AM lags far behind conventional manufacturing in terms of surface quality. This proves a hindrance for many c...

Additive manufacturing has recently emerged as a flexible fabrication method of complex geometry designs. Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) is a 3D printing technique to print complex features and can be used in the manufacturing of complex shapes of products in a cost-effective manner. However, its competency to produce precise products with high d...

In modern production environments, decision support systems for flexible and scalable manufacturing of functional components have become a critical issue for economic success, especially for small and medium enterprises. Knowledge-based modelling of process chains has been effectively applied to the manufacturing of macro-scale products. However, m...

PAM^2, which stands for Precision Additive Metal Manufacturing, is a European MSCA project in which 10 beneficiaries and 2 partners collaborate on improving the precision of metal Additive Manufacturing. Within this project, research is done for each process stage of AM, going from the design stage to modelling, fabricating, measuring and assessmen...

This paper presents an innovative approach to the development of a smart fully-digital manufacturing system based on a modular and reconfigurable production concept. In particular, multiple "plug and play" manufacturing modules, i.e. functional printing, laser processing and welding, in addition to a positioning control unit and quality inspection...

Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies have rapidly spread to cover a wide range of industrial applications, such as aerospace, automotive and biomedical. This is due to their inherent capability to produce parts with complex geometries in short lead times, which shows great potential to strengthen the profitability of supply chains. However, one...

The present paper reports on the development of a biodegradable overmolded orthopedic implant: a metal bone fixing screw, which has been overmolded with a functionalized thin layer of biodegradable polymer to enhance cell adhesion during the healing process. The main challenges were to integrate precise, high-throughput and repeatable solutions to...

The aim of this presentation is to provide a capable, insightful and generic model on how to implement Industry 4.0, practically and profitably.

The arrival of Industry 4.0 has popularised the concept of smart interactions between humans and the physical world that could realise the synergistic integration of intelligent manufacturing assets. However, a systematic and cogent approach to the practical and profitable application of Industry 4.0 is still missing. This paper presents practical...

Layer-based laser ablation of three dimensional micro structured freeform surfaces has become of significant importance for technical applications such as biomimetic surfaces in recent years. In order to identify the optimum set of process parameters for a complex laser ablation operation, a design of experiments (DoE) study has been carried out wi...

Moulded Interconnect Devices (MID) refer to free form components made of polymer with added electrical (conductors, isolators, etc.) and mechanical functions (carrier module, housing, etc). MID are being used in various industry sectors like telecommunication (antenna), automotive (motorcycle handlebars), medical (hearing aid) and many others, due...

As reported before, the Lightweight design department of the Fraunhofer Institute IWU is collaborating with several foundries in manifold projects. The objectives show a large variety starting with energy management activities and leading to product and technology development. Especially in high pressure die casting, most of the products are materi...

The aim of the present contribution is to set up and demonstrate the chain of processes leading to the Ni master of a circular cylinder having an integer number of long grating lines of submicron period at its wall. Microelectronics 2D microstructuring technologies were adapted in order to print a photoresist integer period number on a glass cylind...

Condition monitoring of micro injection moulding is an effective way of understanding the processing effects of variable parameter settings. This paper reports an experimental study that investigates the characteristics of the demoulding behaviour in micro injection moulding (µ-IM) with a focus on the process factors that affect parts’ quality. Usi...

Within “traditional” database systems (row store), the values of a tuple are usually stored in a physically connected manner. In a column store by contrast, all values of each single column are stored one after another. This orthogonal storage organization has the advantage that only data from columns which are of relevance to a query have to be lo...

The paper reports an experimental study that investigates part demoulding behavior in micro-injection moulding with a focus on the effects of pressure and temperature on the demoulding forces. In particular, the demoulding performance of a representative microfluidics part was studied as a function of four process parameters, melt temperature, moul...

Generative manufacturing technologies are gaining more and more of importance as key enabling technologies in future manufacturing, especially when a flexible scalable manufacturing of small medium series of customized parts is required. The paper describes a new approach for design manufacturing of complex three dimensional components building on...

In the last few years, several public persons in Germany have been convicted of inadequate scientific practice and or scientific misconduct in writing their dissertations. An examples is the former German Federal Minister of Defense Guttenberg, who had to resign as a consequence of this scandal. These events have led to an increased interest in met...

Laser ablation of a bulk Pd target in DIW, acetone or ethanol was carried out for the production of nanoparticles colloidal solutions. The size distribution of the nanoparticles follows log-normal function for all three liquids, with a median diameter of 3, 1.1 and 1.5nm and standard deviation of 0.65, 1 and 1, respectively. Amorphous carbon is fou...