Additive World Design for Additive Manufacturing awards

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945473e806With the partnership of CECIMO, the European Association of the Machine Tool Industries, the 2015 edition of the Additive World Design for Additive Manufacturing Challenge took place on February 11th . Other partners were the leading CAE technology provider 3DSIM LLC, Altair Engineering, the consumer 3D printer manufacturer Ultimaker, and AddLab, the shared facility for Additive Manufacturing (AM) metal printing in Eindhoven (Netherlands). The winners in both categories took home the latest Ultimaker 2 3D printer and the top 3 in both categories received a free one-year license of Altair’s Inspire software. Furthermore, the award winning designs will be printed in metal. CECIMO attaches great importance to all the actors of the AM value chain, and designers are the first link of the chain creating products using new additive technologies.

Filip Geerts, CECIMO Director General was part of the jury evaluating the projects, alongside Professor Brent Stucker – chairman of the jury, first chairman of ASTM Committee F42 on Additive Manufacturing Technologies from 2009 to 2014 and CEO and a co-founder of 3DSIM LLC, Erik de Bruijn – Co-founder of Ultimaker, Michal Wanski – Account Manager of Altair responsible for the North-West of Germany and Benelux Region, and Rein van der Mast – Manager Design & Engineering of Additive Industries & AddLab.

Competing in two categories, professional designers/engineers and students had to choose a machine part or product currently manufactured with conventional technologies and redesign it for additive manufacturing and 3D printing. On February 11th, Additive Industries announced the three finalists of each category, among over thirty selected participants coming from all over the world.

Though being a tough decision, especially considering the high technical skills of the contestants, the jury has declared the team E-Move, led by Gilbert Peters, the winner in the professional category. They presented an innovative design of a swing arm for an electric motorcycle offering the opportunity to integrate functionality and other components. The number of required parts, machining and assembly operations and the weight of the final product, were also reduced thanks to an effective topology optimization.

Among the student contesters, the winner was the team “Cooling with heat” from Bremen University, supported by the functional printing group of the Fraunhofer IFAM Bremen and led by Jonas Deitschun. The presented redesign was focusing on building a CPU cooling unit demonstrator, which illustrates the principle of energy harvesting. As a result of being manufactured using AM, the showcased CPU cooling unit boasted a more effective design. Its working principle was to evacuate the heat produced by the CPU while transferring part of the waste heat into electricity to power the cooling fan and therefore avoiding the need of additional energy.

CECIMO has been honored to support the Additive Manufacturing Challenge: Filip Geerts stated that “the role of designers is fundamental when we consider all the steps needed to manufacture using additive manufacturing technologies. New opportunities for the young generations are growing: technical and industrial designers will be increasingly needed by corporations worldwide”.