AMable Services
We provide a services to support you in the evolution of product ideas. Each of these services provides knowledge in a specific area. This knowledge aims to complement your's so that finally, you become an AM expert. See the different services below.
Services available in the Services Arena
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This service supports SME’s with different assessment and evaluation procedures. The aim is to provide the SME with insight about its expertise level in the AM industry. |
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This service offers a structured and customized approach to ensure SMEs seamlessly uptake AM. |
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The service is a key tool to accelerate the R&D to reach the market in companies, with the main aim of facilitating the access to external finance (private and/or public). |
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This is a methodology commonly used for ZABALA as a key tool to foster R&D in companies. It consists of a set of activities (interviews, surveys and questionnaires, studies) with the main aim of assessing companies in innovation gathering the necessary information to do it. This methodology comes from a global diagnosis methodology developed in different projects that cover strategic factors of the company such as Innovation, Market and enhancement of technology, Cooperation and Internationalization The Innovation module consists of a deep analysis of:
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This service supports the process to decide whether AM is a valid option for manufacturing of a product or not. It comprises both technical and economic evaluation steps. |
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Decision support for AM uptake: does AM make sense for manufacturing this particular product by my enterprise? This decision must be made per individual part and based on technical and economic viability. This service offers a method/model/tool which can assist in making this decision on a fact-based level. The AM decision support model service offered comprises various entry points, branches and outcomes, and is dictated by knockout criteria. Criteria include considerations on engineering design, material, process, product quality and economy (cost and time). A questionnaire is used which operates in an FMEA manner providing weight factors related to the answers in terms of probability and confidence. It is distinguished in three different levels, based on the user experience. First level /non-expert approach:
If all three can be assessed OK (first order estimation), then stage two, high level approach can be offered. Second / high- level approach: Initial design evaluation is not enough for convincingly applying AM technology. To be confident about utilizing AM in a certain application, a high-level approach has been drafted, consisting of five criteria:
Each criterion consists of an extensive questionnaire addressing issues to be answered by different types of experts within the company (technologists, purchase officer, marketing, etc.) If one of these experts yields a knock-out, then AM is considered not feasible for that specific application. Third level/ high accuracy metrics quantification: This level is supposed to aid users already confident towards using AM by identifying the exact processes/machines capable of manufacturing the specific part. In addition, this level will be providing highly accurate manufacturing time and cost estimation, based on the different types of AM processes available. |
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This service will provide the knowledge to enable the creation of an AM-buildable product, while integrating incoming design data (customer scan or other input data) and creating the required instructions (file for build, post-processing, inspection instructions) to ensure the final product matches the design requirement. The design process may include a part consolidation exercise, structural optimisation, design concepts, customisation, reverse engineering or simply the redesign of a component for build-ability through AM processes. |
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This service offers to provide working knowledge of how to design products for manufacture by AM in different applications (e.g. topology optimisation, tooling improvement, Part consolidation to improve lead times and Customer-led product design). Customers will be able to access design tools (hardware and software) and resources through this service, and the service will help them through their first AM design process. This will empower SMEs to do functional design, part consolidation and design based on customer input either through scan data or requirements capture. |
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Immersive design and connection with CAD packages will be developed to enable the user to experiment with variants, allowing quick and affordable pre-assessment of product design. |
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The service focuses at providing the user with a realistic representation of the end result of the AM process through an immersive design environment. The ambition is to create a software module able to directly generate a realistic visualization of a certain part after being Additively Manufactured directly from a CAD file. The tool should be able to take into account surface texture/roughness based on the selected material, process/machine type and/or machine settings (such as layer thickness) and generate an appropriate texture to be mapped on the surface of the CAD model so that the user can have a realistic view on how the part will look right after production. The user should be able to modify selected production parameters as well as the CAD file, to understand how these affect the way the part looks. In addition, coupling with the modelling & simulation stage would enable the visualization tool to use the distorted “as manufactured” 3D model instead of the user-provided CAD file, so that a “virtual prototype” will be available for the user to decide if his requirements are met or if any further redesign and/or optimization is required. |
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Computer based solutions of thermo-mechanical effects in AM processes will be implemented to reduce expensive and time consuming “trial and error” experimentation. |
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This service supports the deployment of data analytics solutions applied to AM. Data from different sources are processed via dedicated software, apps and tools, with the aim of extracting and visualizing manufacturing, product and business related KPIs that are useful as decision support tools for SMEs. |
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Measurement and consolidation of data throughout the AM process chain with build monitoring systems& metrology data collection. |
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With this service customers can assess the quality of the final product and make sure that the component fulfils desired specifications, requirements and standards. The service also provides information and knowledge to improve the consistency of the AM process and part quality repeatability. To offer quick and meaningful advice to customers with part quality related issues, participants will be able to fall back onto a continuously expanding repository. This repository contains known issues and solutions with regard to different machines, materials, geometries, etc. As work is carried out through experiments and competitive calls, the repository will be constantly updated with new data. Additional insights from large quantities of data can be gained through the Data Analytics service. Specific work that can be provided through this service includes:
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Integration and handling issues of robotics in additive manufacturing. Including Industry 4.0 concept development. |
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In general, the robotics service will support SMEs in considering and applying robots in AM based manufacturing. From handling systems to gripper tools, requirements matching is addressed.
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Industrialization of AM encompasses the transition from building a few prototypes to full-scale series production of end-use parts. Key concepts of industrialization are establishment of a comprehensive quality management system and seamless integration into existing production lines. |
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This service provides customers with expertise to bridge the gap between prototyping and production through consulting, training, and testing. The primary focus areas for industrialization of AM are enhanced productivity, process repeatability and predictability, and customer relations and support.
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Guidance on quality assurance and certification of parts manufactured by additive manufacuring |
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The offering will be to provide SME’s and midcaps with goal based certification guidelines on the materials and manufacturing development processes for parts produced by AM. Once you have achieved a clear perspective on your certification needs, you can proceed with the "Certification Service (316)" |
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Guidance on post processing possibilities of parts manufacture by metal and plastic AM. The post processing services will at this stage only consider technologies around the AM manufacturing, traditional techniques as CNC; PVD and all other technologies that are standard will not be considered. |
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The service will bring the AM parts closer to the specifications from the customers. Depending of the technology, guidelines will be delivered to SME accordantly with their processes and methodology. |
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This service will provide the knowledge and expertise to SMEs to enable them to identify the best suited materials for their AM product. This can include assessment and determination of available alloys with respect to their product and chosen AM technology, guidance in sourcing high-quality material (wire, powder etc.) and help with understanding the processability and properties of AM microstructures. |
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This service seeks to utilize the wide knowledge-base of the AMable partners to provide assistance to SMEs when it comes to identifying, selecting and processing materials and alloys during AM. This service can provide guidance to SMEs in choosing materials that will meet their design and mechanical property requirements and also help them to understand key material characteristics (i.e. PSD, flowability) that are critical in producing high-quality AM parts. This will also help to connect SMEs with material providers. |
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The Certification Service entails all the validations/assessments that are necessary to receive a certificate from an accredited certification body. The scope of this certificate can range from certifying a machine, a single manufacturing processes, an additive manufactured part, or the entire production facility. |
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The Certification Service builds upon the “Quality Assurance and Road to Certification (313)”. When you start into this certification service, the road-mapping service already analysed your current procedures and compared them to the requirements of your customers and specific standards. Based on this mapping, the certification service brings all required actions into one frame. AMable ensures that all external certification bodies are aligned to achieve the complete certification of your production. Be it one process or an entire production chain. By certifying, this service enables you to attain a recognized certification. You will receive an International certificate that is recognized. This service will be provided in collaboration with 3rd parties (Certification bodies). We will guide you to a suitable certification body. You will have to sign the contract with them.n.b.: in our open call experiments, you may put the cost for this contract under subcontracting |
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Conduct a certification process based upon the results of the “Quality Assurance and Road to Certification (313)” analysis. This guarantees an alignment between your needs and the offering of a certification body.
Overall, this service enables you to attain the right certification that you need, first time right to avoid cost and time-consuming non-conformities. The achievement of the recognised certificate will give you and your customers confidence in your product and in your facility. |