The FlexiMan project is an industrial-driven research project aiming to redesign the existing manufacturing chain for three nautical applications, enhancing their product functionalities and reducing cost and lead time by 40%. The project will develop flexible manufacturing approaches based the additive manufacturing - Directed Energy Deposition (DED) technologies, which will be optimized to account for the demands on design, materials, functionalities, and other requirements related to standardization in the maritime sector. The project has a strong focus on the qualification of DED processes and produced components to guarantee a successful industrial implementation of DED in maritime sector.
The manufacturing approaches developed in this project will combine DED with conventional manufacturing to increase the competitiveness of maritime products. Three components of maritime propulsion and pump systems will be built as demonstrators to validate these manufacturing approaches and to ensure a successful exploitation of the project results. A recycling process of metal
grinding waste will also be investigated. The project will develop procedures for postprocessing, analysing and qualification of recycled powder optimized for DED process. The aim is to enable sustainable raw powders for AM/HM processes and to improve efficiency of maritime circular economy.
FlexiMan is funded by the MarTERA partners Research Council of Norway (RCN) and German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi).
Coordinator
Dr Afaf Saai, SINTEF Industry, Norway
Consortium
SINTEF Industry, Research institute, Norway
SINTEF Manufacturing, Research institute, Norway
Kongsberg Maritime, Large scale enterprise, Norway
Nordic Additive Manufacturing AS, Start-Up, Norway
Fraunhofer IPK, Research institute, Germany
Mecklenburger Metallguss GmbH, SME, Germany
LASERCLADDING Germany GmbH, SME, Germany