Hybrid Manufacturing; Integration of Additive Technologies for Competitive Production of Complex Tools and Products

During the last decade, the development in metallic material additive manufacturing (formerly also known as Rapid Manufacturing, RM or Rapid Tooling, RT) has brought this technology from niche applications and short run tooling to be a competitive method capable of producing complex geometries in industrial grade materials, such as for example injection moulding tool inserts with integrated conformal cooling system. However, while the geometric complexity has little, or no, affection the price or production time in additive manufacturing, this is neither a cheap or particularly “rapid” manufacturing technology. CNC milling is by comparison cheaper and more rapid for basic geometries, but the production time and cost of manufacturing increases with geometric complexity and the amount of material removed. On the other hand, there are strong limitations on the geometric complexity that is possible to produce by CNC milling. This paper presents an approach to exploit the combined benefits of each, additive and subtractive, manufacturing technology and integrate these into a hybrid manufacturing solution. This will be demonstrated by the development of a hybrid manufacturing cell which is a combination of a powder bed additive manufacturing metal system and a 5 axis milling machine with the primary objective of producing injection moulding tooling inserts, however the principle should be applicable for a variety of different types of products.