BMW, EOS, DyeMansion and Grenzebach have declared its three-year POLYLINE project, set up to automate an additive manufacturing production line for polymer parts at scale, a success.
The project was announced in May 2020, with the four aforementioned companies backed by a consortium of 11 other organisations.
Installed at its Additive Manufacturing Campus, BMW has now taken over the coordination of the different project partners who all played a significant role in setting the POLYLINE production line up. Over the last three years, EOS has taken responsibility for the printing with its EOS P500, while Grenzebach contributed its expertise in intelligent and safe networking of manufacturing processes, with its Exchange P500/4 solution placed directly alongside the printer to automatically replace the exchange frame, cool build jobs, and transport the exchange frame to the next station with an automated guided vehicle (AGV). DyeMansion’s solutions, meanwhile, were used to deliver the right look and feel for the applications, cleaning parts, finishing them, and then adding colour.
Having come through the pilot of the POLYLINE production line, BMW will now continue to use the automated workflow to produce plastic parts for the automotive industry, complementing its machining and casting techniques. The partners believe that because the POLYLINE production line is system-agnostic, it could be adjusted to suit other industries beyond automotive.
“Current printers are fast. Soon, they will be even faster,” commented Dr. Blanka Szost-Ouk, Head of Additive Manufacturing, Pre-Development and Planning at BMW Group. “Therefore, logically the cost per part per unit will be cheaper, but printed jobs would have to be changed more frequently. To be human centric, we need to put the people in the middle of our process chain and make it effective, cheap, and simply excellent for happy and motivated people. The POLYLINE automated process chain fits into the next generation printers and our standard production requirements, is a system-agnostic solution due to their standardised interfaces, which is crucial for scaling-up additive manufacturing.”
“Automation is one of the key drivers in our strategy, making it possible to integrate our systems in automated production lines like POLYLINE,” added DyeMansion CTO Phillip Kramer. “And this is important to reduce cost per part and ensure the right quality throughout the whole production chain.”
“We have developed this at BMW for the automotive industry,” offered Fabian Krauß, Head of Polymer Systems at EOS, “and we can now adopt and adjust it to other industries.”
The full roster of partners involved in the POLYLINE project includes: BMW, DyeMansion, EOS, Grenzebach, Krumm e.K., 3YOURMIND, Optris, Additive Marking, Olschner, Uni Paderborn, Uni Duisburg-Essen, Uni Dortmund, Fraunhofer IGCV, Universität Augsburg, Fraunhofer IML.
Among the associated partners of the project were: WAZP, STIHL, Protiq, GS1 Germany, Oechsler, ZF, Main Incubator, TOPTICA, Prototal, 1zu1.
