Grimm, Marco ; Anderl, Reiner (2015)
Additive Manufacturing Opportunities and Threats: Concept for AM Knowledge Protection.
PDT Europe 2015. Stockholm, Sweden (12.10.2015 - 14.10.2015)
Konferenzveröffentlichung, Bibliographie

Kurzbeschreibung (Abstract)

Additive manufacturing technology has vastly evolved over the past years. Due to the scalability of the technology, additive manufacturing systems range from desktop 3D printers to high-end professional production systems for small-batch production. This enables consumers as well as companies to manufacture individualized products cost-effectively. Additionally, the increasing production quality and availability of additive manufacturing systems facilitate new business models: Distributed production of individualized parts directly at the customer site or need-based production in target markets. Mandatory basis for distributed additive manufacturing is product and manufacturing data, which accurately represent physical products in a digital form as well as Internet technology enabling location-independent transmission and usage of the data. However, due to the high content of stored intellectual property and simple distribution of digital data, risks are involved in distributed manufacturing. State of the art in the additive manufacturing industry today is to exchange product data as tessellated geometry data and manufacturing data as plaintext NC programs. This data exchange is done on file basis, which makes it simple to illegitimately reproduce parts. Suitable data exchange processes as well as efficient protection methods are not yet available to the industry. As a result, companies are not able to establish new value added chains and distribution channels based on distributed additive manufacturing. The scientific challenge is to develop suitable means to exchange and effectively protect additive manufacturing information as well as capture its use by customers.

This contribution will discuss the application of PDM/PLM means and cryptography on distributed additive manufacturing and propose a new concept to exchange and protect additive manufacturing information. Industrial use cases are defined and the process chain of distributed additive manufacturing are adapted for high efficiency and security of distributed manufacturing. To demonstrate the feasibility, a prototypical implementation in a physical 3D printer demonstrator is presented. With this prototype, it is shown that the proposed Internet-based distributed additive manufacturing concept improves functional capabilities and usability compared to current industrial approaches. Furthermore it is shown that with the concept, providers can technically control the quantity of produced parts, materials used etc. and prove successful production of a part, e.g. for pay-per-use scenarios.

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