01 02 03 3D Cocooner New production technology with enormous potential Even if conventional injection moulding is still superior with regard to tolerance and dimensional precision, additive manufacturing methods already belong to standard industrial production processes. Especially in model construction, 3D printing has become indispensable for making prototypes and end products in small quantities. As a rule, the required shape is built up layer by layer according to the specifications from a CAD program. Depending on the process, this involves powders, granulates or thermoplastic filaments being melted together line by line to make a solid body. However, materials that can be freely printed in space – such as the UV-cured glass fibres used in the 3D Cocooner – are still largely undergoing basic research and are not yet available on the market. New dimensions of product design With the 3D Cocooner, Festo has developed a bionic technology platform that combines the individual benefits of additive manufacturing with the precision controls and agility of an industrial high-speed handling system. A new tool of this kind enables shapes and structures that cannot be made via conventional production means. The delicate bodies made of frameworks of rods open up new dimensions for individual product design. Maximum variety using minimal materials Complex bodies, which up until now have only been able to be depicted as a virtual model in a computer simulation, are now taking a physical and tangible form. Geometric corrections can already be made at an early stage, which makes the design process significantly easier. The thread can be reset at any point on the lattice structure, where it continues to build. This ultimately results in an almost endless variety of design options using minimal amounts of material. The UV-cured glass fibre itself has astonishing tensile and bending strength. If you were to connect several 3D Cocooners together via a network, extensive structures could be constructed within a very short time, which, thanks to their stability, would have tremendous potential in the most diverse areas. Particularly in sectors like the packaging industry or medical technology, a host of new possibilities are opened up by this technology. By integrating the spinneret into the tripod, the developers are also testing how existing standard components can be enhanced for digital fabrication, and hence the production tasks of the future. Digital enhancement for a flexible production process A fundamental change is taking place in industry. The trend is towards customised products. That is why, alongside established mass production, increasingly flexible production facilities are emerging, which can adjust themselves to small batch numbers and a high level of variety – among them also agile design methods, with which individual and tailored goods can be produced in real time using additive manufacturing. In order to manage this complexity, facilities and components have to be able to coordinate with one another. As part of Industry 4.0, a digitisation process is therefore emerging, which allows traditional industrial processes to be merged with modern information and communications technologies. The components used are given the necessary capabilities by being equipped with wireless and storage-enabled labels with their own computing capacity. In this way, subsystems, tools, transport units and materials will be able to organise themselves in the future to form a production unit at machine level. From the virtual model to the finished product On a system like the 3D Cocooner, the virtual design program supplies the assembly instructions directly at tool level. This makes it possible to go digitally from the design to the finished product – without detours via the otherwise usual sales, production and logistics channels. The declared objective – being able to supply batch size 1 at reasonable costs using automated large-scale facilities in industry – comes one step closer with such solutions. The warehousing costs for finished workpieces are also omitted in the case of such on-demand production. The raw materials must simply be available in a sufficient quantity, while the finished goods can be delivered to the customers immediately. 01: Parametric design: a wide range of variants are generated from one and the same basic shape 02: New concepts: the unique construction method opens up unlimited design options 03: Digital fabrication: the software transfers the geometry of the structure directly to the tripod’s travel paths 6 Festo AG & Co. KG 7 3D Cocooner: bionic lattice structures from the robotic spinneret
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