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3D printing of spare parts to replace imported parts

New Year - new sanctions, and this time serious ones. The mass withdrawal of foreign companies from the Russian market threatens with an acute shortage of spare parts in a number of industries. But there is good news: many components can be replaced with 3D printed counterparts, and in this article we will share a few illustrative examples.

In fact, the replacement of parts with 3D printed analogues and spare parts has long been practiced by many enterprises around the world - somewhere in an experimental manner, and somewhere in a planned manner.

Siemens Mobility Russia

For example, in 2020, Siemens Mobility purchased two industrial FDM 3D printers for its Russian division to print spare parts for the Sapsan high-speed trains running between Moscow and St. Petersburg. The reason for this decision was not even a shortage of components, but the timing of deliveries, the desire to simplify logistics and achieve 99 percent readiness of rolling stock.

“These figures would be physically impossible to achieve by relying solely on external sourcing and traditional manufacturing methods, but 3D printers give us the ability to cost-effectively produce parts locally, thereby reducing the need to stock certain spare parts and tools. We have already seen the success of the Easy Sparovation Part program in Germany, where this technology has enabled Siemens Mobility to reduce time costs by up to 95% compared to traditional production methods. The delivery of an additional thirteen Velaro trains will require long-term maintenance of a large fleet with very tight time constraints. Accordingly, 3D printing is an ideal addition to production facilities, providing flexibility in terms of in-house production and replacement of parts at any time, as needed,” explained Alexey Fedoseev, director of service support for the Russian division of Siemens Mobile.

2050.Additive Technologies

The Russian company 2050.Additive Technologies, which is part of the 2050.DIGITAL group, has gone the same way. In 2019, this enterprise undertook the creation of an entire factory for the production of parts for service locomotive depots and transport engineering enterprises, with the support of two industry partners - Transmashholding JSC and the LocoTech group of companies. The enterprise's capacities include several dozen 3D printers, mainly printing with polymer filaments.

Especially for the needs of the new plant 2050. DIGITAL has prepared a database with hundreds of 3D models of various parts created by reverse engineering using 3D scanning: buttons, handles, holders, bushings, fasteners, cabin interior elements and so on. The company calls this approach “seamless contact”: suppliers in the regions can select the necessary spare parts in the catalog and issue a command for 3D printing, quickly receiving the required components.

Abigo Medical

Can metal parts be replaced with plastic parts? Yes, you can. This is where refractory engineering thermoplastics such as polyetheretherketone (PEEK) come to the rescue. Due to its strength and temperature characteristics, this polymer is capable of replacing aluminum alloys, and besides, it is non-toxic, which is important, for example, in the medical or pharmaceutical industry.

Our next example is the Swedish pharmaceutical company Abigo Medical, which needed to urgently replace worn rollers on a packaging line. It took at least two months to deliver parts. As a result, the management decided to order branded parts, but at the same time quickly produce 3D-printed counterparts so as not to lose money due to long downtime. The matter was complicated by the fact that the temperature on the broken line fluctuates between 85-87 ° C, so the material had to be not only durable and non-toxic, but also heat-resistant, and here PEEK showed itself in all its glory.

“We expected the 3D printed rollers to last a week or two. By the time the original parts arrived, they had been running for nine weeks. The quality control department ordered that the homemade rollers be replaced with factory ones, but at that time the 3D printed PEEK parts were still in order and cost ten times cheaper than the original ones, ”said Abigo Medical technologist Linus Göhle.

CLAAS

And this is an example from the Krasnodar Territory: a plant of the German machine-building company CLAAS, which produces agricultural machinery, operates here (or, at least, until recently). In 2020, the CLAAS design office took on the task of exploring the possibility of additive manufacturing of individual components and spare parts and immediately achieved interesting results.

One of the first prototypes was a 3D printed FDM-printed steering arm for the TERRA TRAC crawler chassis. The polymer 3D-printed part, with one hundred percent compliance with the original in terms of maximum load, came out six kilograms lighter, and this is nothing less than a 27 percent weight saving. The main point is that spare parts for old, no longer produced models, or rarely requested parts that are impractical to store in a warehouse, can be reproduced on a 3D printer, but they can be quickly printed - within a few hours.

Ford

Some companies generally prefer to rely on 3D printing not even spare parts, but original components. Of course, this doesn't always work. Additive manufacturing is mainly useful when it comes to the production of single or small-scale parts, and there are many such cases, for example, in the automotive industry.

Ford has operated a purpose-built advanced manufacturing technology center in Detroit since 2018, equipped with more than two dozen 3D printers in technologies ranging from FDM/FFF to Selective Metal Powder Laser Sintering (DMLS).

In the same year, the center supplied the first mass-produced 3D printed parts - F-150 Raptor truck components for the Chinese market and the Ford Shelby Mustang GT 500 sports car. Why did the company decide to resort to additive manufacturing instead of casting? Simply because both of these models were planned to be produced in limited quantities, and the deployment of a foundry for the production of several thousand plastic parts turned out to be unprofitable. It turned out that it is faster and cheaper to print the required components with photopolymer resins without spending money on expensive casting equipment.

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