Additive Manufacturing of Cutting Tools - AddiZwerk

Project summary

Manufacturers of cutting tools are facing challenges to develop more efficient tools. Their efforts are hampered by traditional production methods and technologies. Traditional technologies (e.g. milling) follow a line of sight principle and face restrictions concerning geometry features, especially in terms of internal geometries. Additionally, these methods require elaborate setup processes to produce small batch sizes and cutting tool prototypes, which leads to an increasing time to market. An approach to overcome these impediments is the application of additive manufacturing (AM). AddiZwerk aims at enabling AM of cutting tools by qualifying cemented carbide and ceramic materials for additive processes and by developing innovative tool features that take advantage of AM’s freeform fabrication approach. By additively generating cutting tools and applying them in machining experiments, the qualification of AM tools in comparison to traditional cutting tools will be determined.