BeShape (funded by the French research agency ANR): Design of lightweight parts made by Wire and Arc Additive Manufacturing (2019-2023)
Scientific responsible at COSMER:
Dr. Sébastien Campocasso
National project coordinator:
Dr. Matthieu Museau (G-SCOP, Univ. Grenoble Alpes)
Project partners:
Univ. Grenoble-Alpes, DPRI, PRODWAYS RAF, SAFRAN AE
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Abstract
WAAM manufacturing processes using an electric arc to fuse a filler metal in wire form. The 3D part is thus generated by stacking welding beads from any type of weldable material. WAAM processes have the advantage of being more productive and less expensive than other Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies.
The AM processes are able to deposit the material locally in the right place for making lighter parts by removing some under constrained areas. However, this opportunity remains today little used in WAAM type AM. On one hand because the results from shape optimization in Design For Additive Manufacturing are not manageable as such with this technologies. On the other hand, the existing CAMs for these technologies currently use only parallel plane-based slicing and contour and hatch-based filling strategies.
The project objective is to provide a process for designing lightweight parts by an assembly of predefined patterns manufacturable by a process WAAM. These parameterized patterns are proposed taking into account the manufacturing constraints. The assembly and configuration of the patterns are designed with the objective of designing a part with a minimum of material. We assume that the manufacturability of the part is ensured by the intelligent assembly of individually manufacturable patterns and by using the opportunities offered by the generation of 3D trajectories.
The partnership is composed of 2 laboratories, G-SCOP (conducting researches activities on AM since 2012) and COSMER (leading work on the trajectory generation for AM since 2015) and 3 companies, DRPI (Additive manufacturing CAM software provider), PRODWAYS (WAAM machine builder) and SAFRAN AE as end user (an international high-technology group and tier-1 supplier of systems and equipment in the Aerospace and Defense markets).