Tutorium „Design for Additive Manufacturing“ in winter semester 2019/2020

This interdisciplinary course highlights the 3D printing of a wind turbine through tasks from four different fields. Students from the four fields of study experimented with additive manufacturing technology in group work, evaluating the technical and economic risks and influencing factors.

The tutorial is jointly offered and supervised by the institutes “Integrated Electronic Systems” (Prof. Hofmann, Electrical Engineering), “Facade Technology” (Prof. Knaack, Civil Engineering), “Technology and Innovation Management” (Prof. Kock, Law and Economics) and “Product Development and Machine Elements” (Prof. Kirchner, Mechanical Engineering).

At the beginning of the tutorial, the participants from these four institutes worked on an economic question, in which a business case was examined with the inclusion of additive manufacturing processes. Subsequently, the students were first introduced to the manufacturing technology of Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) in the mechanical engineering part and learned about the parameters influencing component quality. Based on this, the students designed and manufactured the connections of the rotor blades to the rotor, taking into account the design rules and potentials of this manufacturing process. In the electrical engineering part, the influence of various parameters of the DC generator of the model wind turbines was the focus of attention. During the manual production of the generators, the students familiarized themselves with the basic functional principle and learned about the influence of constructive changes during the production of the generator. Subsequently, the geometry of the wind turbine masts was adapted in the civil engineering section by means of topology optimization, taking into account given load cases. Topology optimization is a computer-based calculation method which minimizes the mass of load-bearing structures under given boundary conditions by means of finite element simulation.

At the end of the tutorial the four groups presented their results and demonstrated the functionality of their model wind turbine to the supervising professors and scientific staff.

We are looking forward to numerous registrations of interested students also next year.