A star of the CONEXPO/CON-AGG show in Las Vegas in early March was an unassuming, unbranded mini excavator busily moving dirt around in a corner of the show. It was the progeny of Project AME, a collaboration between a national laboratory and industry, academic and government partners to bring 3D printing to an industrial scale in service of construction.
目的是生产机器的重要部分 - 基于新荷兰5.5吨的迷你挖掘机和制造商贡献的数据 - 使用三种不同的3D打印技术，然后将它们与常规零件集成到常规的机器中对于conexpo。项目负责人Lonnie J. Love是田纳西州Oak Ridge的Oak Ridge National Laboratory的公司研究人员，他说，更多的部分本来可以是3D打印的，但该团队急于开幕式。
Printed components included the cab, which was printed in five hours with carbon-fiber-reinforced ABS plastic on Cincinnati Inc.’s “big-area additive manufacturing” (BAAM) printer; the 7-ft-long, 400-lb “stick” at the end of the boom, which was printed in five days on a Wolf Robotics “Wolf Pack” printer, using a new arc-fused steel-wire process, co-developed with the lab; and a 13-lb aluminum heat exchanger, printed in about 10 days by laser sintering on a Concept Laser X-line 1000 powder bed machine.
“It’s not going to replace traditional manufacturing,” Love says, “but it has a lot of potential in low-volume, one-of-a-kind production because you don’t have tooling.” He says that on-demand production could help to eliminate the need for manufacturers to maintain parts inventories for equipment that can have a service life of 50 years. Further, it could be used to create tooling for conventional manufacturing processes. “The creation of those tools is the killer application of additive printing,” Love says.
洛夫说，汽车制造商通常每年每年花费2亿美元用于工具。“这是一种，每个模具都是不同的。而且它们也很大，通常是用坚固的钢制成的。”
工具对一辆汽车的引擎盖,例如,might start as a 4-ft-long by 4-ft-wide by 3-ft-thick piece of forged steel and take months to be delivered—and then require a lot of machining to get the right form. “The lead time is usually months—up to years,” Love says. “With additive printing, you start with a wire and you can make it hollow on the inside or honeycombed. You can print a good-sized mold in days for tens of thousands of dollars, instead of years and millions.”
Love says the team included the National Fluid Power Association’s Eric Lanke, who proposed the project; Mike Gust, the University of Minnesota’s Center for Compact and Efficient Fluid Power industry liaison who coordinated production of the student-designed cab with Rick Neff, a BAAM sales manager at Cincinnati Inc. Also on the team were Mark Schaub, representing Wolf Robotics, and John Rozum, an Association of Equipment Manufacturers director who coordinated with CONEXPO.
As the donor of the mini excavator, Gary Kassen, engineering director at Case New Holland, says, “I saw this could dramatically shorten our development time on new products and that low-volume specialty options could be viable. The project delivered on both.”
In remarks at the unveiling, Love said the project exemplifies the service national labs can provide through cooperative research and development agreements that safeguard intellectual property and share development costs while opening up process improvements to industry. “The message of Project AME is not about just 3D-printing an excavator. It’s about using something like CONEXPO as a forcing function to get scientists and engineers to work side by side with industry to make it more competitive.”
