Rosswag Engineering, a leading supplier of special metal powders, high-quality components and qualification services in the field of metal AM, is offering the AM community the world’s first LPBF process parameter marketplace to make the benefits of optimized parameter sets and new materials easily accessible to all market participants.
Based on many years of experience with the production of more than 60,000 metal AM components and the in-house qualification of more than 40 LPBF materials, Rosswag started the AddiMap project together with NuCOS, a full-stack software company, in 2020. The aim is to develop a digital B2B platform to provide all materials, parameters, data and services for the accelerated industrialization and democratization of metal 3D-printing.
Interview with Philipp Schwarz, Platform Manager at AddiMap & Gregor Graf, Head of Enginering at Rosswag Engineering.
Easy Engineering: What are the main areas of activity of the company?
Philipp Schwarz & Gregor Graf: The first service of the AddiMap platform is a marketplace for trading reliable process parameters and material data to reduce the inefficiencies in LPBF process parameter development projects. A parameter set is consisting of more than 100 different variables and strongly depending on the system, material and process chain.
Instead of validating the quality and productivity of parameter sets over several weeks with in-house testing and analyses, already existing and validated parameters sets can be traded immediately on the marketplace to realize the full technological potential instantly. This enables customers with a small investment for example to increase productivity of their AM systems by more than 80 % compared to generic standard parameters. For data providers with the focus on R&D activities, the marketplace creates new business models through the sales of otherwise unused and unproductive parameters and data.
The initial goal of the marketplace is to avoid occupying AM system capacity to resolve issues that have already been resolved multiple times, so that market participants can focus on new, value-added applications for the acceptance and continued growth of the AM technology itself. If the AM community is willing to trade data and pay for the increased efficiency, all market participants will benefit from the flourishing platform due to the higher amount of offer and demand. Everybody user in the AM ecosystem is welcome to join the open platform.
E.E: What’s the news about new products?
P.S & G.G: The AddiMap Marketplace is the world’s first approach to make AM process parameters and material data tradeable and we launched it during Formnext 2022.
E.E: What are the ranges of products?
P.S & G.G: At the moment there are process parameters and corresponding material data available at the AddiMap Marketplace for Laser Powder Bed Fusion Systems. Mainly for SLM Solutions systems validated from Rosswag Engineering. The offering will steadily be increased by parameters for new requirements, systems and materials from third parties.
E.E: At what stage is the market where you are currently active?
P.S & G.G: The Marketplace for AM Process Parameters is something completely new and we are the first ones offering this. We not only have to provide a technical solution for a standardized way of trading process parameters and material data, we also have to explain the concept and it’s enormous advantages when it comes to new business models and efficiency increases to the market participants.
E.E: What can you tell us about market trends?
P.S & G.G: The complexity of the metal AM market is increasing exponentially. New systems, advanced materials, adjustable laser sources. A single engineering or company can’t keep up with these advancements. But the collective intelligence of the community and a new way of platform-based collaboration could leverage the full technological potential of metal 3D-printing. And in our opinion, the market is now ready for this step because the “lone warrior” strategy will soon not work anymore despite the complexity increase.
Additionally, one of the biggest trends in the market are new materials specially designed for Metal AM and AddiMap can help to industrialize these alloys faster and more cost-effective.
And if you think about the visionary potential of functionally graded materials (FGMs), to optimize every voxel within your part according to the usage demands and what this means for the number of parameters to be used during printing of a high-end component, a platform like AddiMap will be needed.
E.E: What are the most innovative products marketed?
P.S & G.G: There are currently several special parameters sets on the AddiMap Marketplace.
E.g. process parameters for a Q&T automotive steel AISI 4140/ 42CrMo4 (just processed by a handful of AM service providers but well-known in conventional manufacturing) or a high-productive 316L parameter to print 80 % faster with nearly the same part quality.
But the biggest innovation currently relies on the backend of the platform. The form-based input of parameters across the whole process chain allows a standardized way of storing and trading your data and makes it possible to enable full traceability of the influencing factors on testing results.
E.E: What estimations do you have for the rest of 2022?
P.S & G.G: In 2022 we want to further develop the AddiMap Marketplace according to the market needs and bring more process parameters and partners to the platform to increase the added value for the AM community.