At Ford’s RIC – Research and Innovation Center in Aachen, Germany, the automotive leader is utilizing instinctive software to automate the plan of additive manufactured production tools. The software was made by the Berlin-based organization trinckle, whose flagship software “paramate” simplifies the plan procedure for client explicit items, regardless of whether that is consumer goods like eyewear or the mass customisation of copper inductors, which saw the organization scoop a year ago’s TCT Industrial Product Application Award.
While its an obvious fact that creating tools and manufacturing helps by means of conventional techniques are costly, Ford found that up to half of its all out expenses per tool were in actuality in the manual plan step, “the new bottleneck” as Lars Bognar, an examination engineer at Ford Research and Advanced Engineering Europe, calls it.
To defeat that, trinckle has worked with Ford to build up an inward application for the effective generation of labelling jigs – a hand tool used to precisely place name and model identifications on the body of a vehicle.
“For each new line and each special edition, these tools must be specifically designed to position the badges with exact accuracy,” Bognar explained. “This design task is not a trivial one, as the tools have to adapt precisely to the free-form surfaces of the car body sheet. It can easily last between two and four hours to create an appropriate AM-ready design.”
Inside the software, the client essentially uploads the model information of the car body and paramate’s algorithms then automatically create the geometry of the tool to fit the shape of the car and structure the base of the new jig. Extra components, for example, handles, magnet mounts for fixation and edge guides would then be able to be included by just clicking where the engineer wishes to place them. This specific application has diminished the plan procedure from 2-4 hours down to only 10 minutes without the requirement for a CAD or AM-trained engineer. Ford trusts this can possibly spare a huge number of Euros per tool, which, considering its Ford Focus alone is made utilizing more than 50 custom designed jigs, tools and fixtures, could account for colossal savings across multiple models.
“The labelling jig itself is not different from the jigs we have seen before. The innovation is that you don’t need a CAD experienced person for the final design. The software application is so intuitive that anyone, with a little bit of technical understanding, can create such a jig,” Dr. Ole Bröker, Head of Business Development & Consulting at trinckle, told TCT. “Ford’s goal is to enable employees on the shop floor to do the design adaptions on their own, within some boundaries of course. This would mean opening the design process for those who work with the tools on a daily basis.”
The plans are sent straightforwardly to Ultimaker Cura software and 3D printed on-site utilizing, for instance, desktop Ultimaker S5 machines, which Ford has installed inside its shop floors crosswise over Europe. In spite of the fact that this application is still in the R&D department, after a successful pilot, trinckle says the conceivable outcomes are wide open.
Bröker included: “We just picked the low hanging fruit with these labelling jigs and of course we go further, we are already working on the next application within the field of production and assembly means at Ford. These are a great use cases for our paramate software because these tool geometries are very use case specific. They are not even too complex in many cases, but they still demand a lot of time-consuming manual design work. We try to get rid of that.”
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