Siemens
Siemens Dyemansion
Digital reference factory for a footwear production.
DyeMansion has announced a series of partnerships designed to ‘industrialise’ additive manufacturing and ensure flexible, local and on-demand production.
Among its new collaborators are industry giant Siemens, 3D printing service provider Paragon and the Digital Manufacturing Centre in the UK.
Through its partnership with Siemens, DyeMansion has equipped its Powerfuse S with the ‘newest Siemens automation technology’ which the partners believe helps to achieve an ‘end-to-end value chain’ for Selective Laser Sintering 3D printing processes. The partners will be highlighting the capabilities of such a workflow at Formnext Connect, with a keynote presentation focusing on the use of DyeMansion’s post-processing technology in a footwear application. In this use case study, DyeMansion’s Polyshot Surfacing technology was used to finish the top of the shoe, while its VaporFuse Surfacing technology was used to finish the midsole. Next year, Siemens intends to install ‘key processes’ along the value chain of this application.
“The automated chain of coordinated production steps from all suppliers, from design and printing to post-processing, as well as end-to-end IT integration is crucial for high productivity and maximum flexibility. This applies to series parts as well as to a highly flexibles lot-size-1 production for individualised products or spare parts,” commented Dr Karsten Heuser, Vice President Additive Manufacturing at Siemens Digital Industries. “with end-to-end digitisation and automation solutions from Siemens, we have succeeded, together with our partners EOS and DyeMansion, in creating a seamlessly integrated end-to-end value chain for industrial additive manufacturing with Selective Laser Sintering and industrial post-processing solutions using polymers.”
DyeMansion
Design study of a footwear application being produced in the digital reference factory.
DyeMansion considers digitalisation as a key element to increase the overall equipment effectiveness of its post-processing systems and has thus implemented remote access, digital shopfloor integration and monitoring and data analysis capabilities within its Powerfuse S offering. Remote access allows fast root cause analysis and problem solving to be carried out via secure VPN connections; integrating the physical system to the digital shop floor enables communication to MES and ERP systems using the OPC-UA protocol; and a real-time monitoring dashboard allows users to observe system status and sensor data. The company says these capabilities ‘sets the basis’ to use applications like the Siemens MindSphere IoT cloud platform in the future.
Meanwhile, DyeMansion has also announced 3Dees in the Czech Republic and Imagenet in the United States as local resellers of its product portfolio, with Paragon, Incremental Engineering, Printing Portal and the Digital Manufacturing Centre in the UK, as well as Mausa in Spain, all becoming production partners.
DyeMansion believes these developments will help the company to contribute to advancing the capabilities of additive manufacturing as more look to increase their integration of the technology into their supply chains.
“The industrialisation and automation of the entire additive manufacturing value chain is a major task that can only be accomplished together,” offered Felix Ewald, CEO and co-founder of DyeMansion. “Strong alliances between respective market leaders can unfold the power for transformation. Through this new global partnership with Siemens and our strong partner platform, we see ourselves perfectly positioned to spearhead the transformation of manufacturing.”
“We are proud of our partner platform where the undisputed experts along the complete AM manufacturing process chain teams up,” added Kai Witter, Chief Customer Officer at DyeMansion. “Our partners know exactly what works, what does not work and what end-users expect from 3D printed products. I could not imagine a better partner set-up to pursue the goal of transforming the manufacturing industry with more resilient, distributed and sustainable supply chains.”
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