The fast-rising trend of additive manufacturing is forcing changes in the plastics industry. One of these relates to product development with traditional design approaches completely misaligned with what is required for additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing. To respond to this challenge, Germany’s Institute of Plastics Processing in Industry and the Skilled Crafts (IKV, Aachen; www.ikv-aachen.de) at RWTH Aachen University (Aachen; www.rwth-aachen.de) is inviting all companies in the entire plastics industry supply chain to participate in its study – “Product development in plastics additive manufacturing”. IKV will launch the market and technology study in March 2017 and it will run for 12 months. Together with industrial partners, IKV aims to identify present and future challenges, define development targets and draw up a strategic roadmap.

The institute said current development methods fail to make use of the many opportunities and possibilities offered by additive manufacturing. Conventional approaches do not exhaust the potential of its virtually unlimited geometric freedom, and design and data process techniques are complex and time-intensive, having to be performed new for each variant. This makes the cost-effective, mass production of individual and personalised parts impossible.

The study will seek to identify the limitations that exist in product development and establish what scenarios could be used to eliminate them. Recommendations for action will then be established to set out the ideal, process-specific development process for additive manufacturing. Detailed analyses will focus on material properties, modelling approaches, design rules and automation potential. The development of additively manufactured prototypes and technical plastic end-components will be investigated, as well as additively manufactured tools for processing plastics using traditional techniques.