BMW Group
BMW Munich campus
BMW Group has officially opened its new €15 million Additive Manufacturing Campus in Munich, Germany as it looks to ‘develop its position as the leader’ of 3D printing in the aerospace leader.
The facility will act as a centre for prototype and series part production, research into new 3D printing technologies and associate training for the global rollout of toolless production. It also houses around 50% of BMW’s global additive manufacturing capacity, with 50 industrial polymer and metal systems located in the AM Campus and 50 more spread across locations around the world.
In the last few years, BMW has invested heavily in 3D printing technology, partnering with and investing in the likes of Carbon, Desktop Metal, Xometry and Elise, while also deploying additive manufacturing to produce series components, such as a fixture for the folding mechanism of the i8 Roadster’s soft top, and mass customisation parts like the MINI Yours Customised side scuttles. Last year alone, the company additively manufactured 300,000 parts.
With the new facility, BMW has expanded its commitment to additive. It will place a focus on the optimisation of new technology and materials for ‘comprehensive use across the company’. This will include the automating of process chains to reduce manual work, while a production line is being set up with research partners for the specific requirements of series, individual and spare-part production. The production targets confirm the status of this collaborative undertaking as a lighthouse project: output is expected to total at least 50,000 series components a year, with over 10,000 individual and spare parts.
BMW's new facility will also play host to the development of a consistent quality assurance methodology in line with the POLYLINE project, which was announced in May, to accelerate the additive manufacture of polymer parts in the automotive space. Findings from this project are expected to help reduce manufacturing costs by up to 50%.
Read more: The Ultimate Printing Machine - How BMW is applying 3D printing to commercial vehicles
The Munich AM Campus will act as the central hub of BMW’s additive manufacturing efforts, with staff from all over the world set to be trained up in order to ensure the successful global rollout of 3D printing.
“Additive manufacturing is already an integral part of our worldwide production system today and established in our digitisation strategy,” commented Milan Nedeljković, BMW AG Board Member for Production. “In the future, new technologies of this kind will shorten production times even further and allow us to benefit even more fully from the potential of toolless manufacturing.”
“Our goal is to industrialise 3D printing methods more and more for automotive production and to implement new automation concepts in the process chain,” added Daniel Schäfer, Senior Vice President for Production Integration and Pilot Plant at the BMW Group. “This will allow us to streamline component manufacturing for series production and speed up development. At the same time, we are collaborating with vehicle development, component production, purchasing and the supplier network, as well as various other areas of the company to systematically integrate the technology and utilise it effectively.”
