Optimising surface finish in additive manufacturing in the steel industry to reduce defects and manufacturing costs

• The European SuPreAM project is built on integrating all the aspects affecting the surface integrity of additively manufactured parts.
• It is to develop predictive models which factor in the influence of additive manufacturing technology, steel grades, machining strategies and process parameters plus component surface properties.
• A plastic injection mould and a structural component for aerospace applications have been selected as case studies.

The European SuPreAM consortium led by the Eurecat technology centre is to develop new predictive and optimisation models for surface finishing operations to drive additive manufacturing in the industrial steel sector and reduce defects and manufacturing costs which will also help to minimise scrap.

The project’s predictive modelling of finishing operations will factor in the influence of additive manufacturing technology and steel grades together with machining strategies and process parameters plus the surface properties of components made by additive manufacturing, enabling the identification of the main variables affecting surface integrity.

The SuPreAM project is built on integrating “all the aspects affecting the surface integrity of additively manufactured parts in order to deliver machining solutions and strategies at the upstream design and finishing stage of the part, while also avoiding scrap generation, with a view to producing defect-free components,” says Montse Vilaseca, the project’s coordinator and director of the Metallic and Ceramic Materials Unit at Eurecat.

Two case studies have been selected for this purpose in which the components are real in-use parts. They are a plastic injection mould where surface finish is crucial to ensure the mould’s performance and the quality of the injected parts, and a structural component for aerospace applications which calls for fatigue resistance. Demonstrators of both case studies will be produced in the project and used for model validation and comparison with conventional steel parts.

The project consortium is coordinated by Eurecat and its other partners are ArcelorMittal, a steel producer, Grupo Sevilla Control and DRT Rapid, machining businesses, and three research institutes in the International Centre for Numerical Methods in Engineering (CIMNE), the IDONIAL Foundation and Luleå University of Technology.