Triple hybrid additive manufacturing

Project aim

The specific focus is on investigating wire arc additive manufacturing and its combination with CNC and powder additive fabrication processes. Moreover, investigating the limitations of combining 3 fabrications processes in terms of technical challenges found in certain geometries to quality assurance.

Project background

Manufacturing throughout history has always been the backbone of society. Thus, as societies have advanced naturally so have the technologies utilised. As a result, many fabrication processes exist today aimed at supporting production throughput, design complexity, and increasingly challenging application requirements. This has opened the door for the hybridisation of multiple fabrication processes combined in a singular manufacturing cell. These developments have been aimed towards synergistically gaining the benefits that each fabrication technology provides to support industry needs. At Strathclyde, we are looking at the limitations of hybridisation and the ways in which these limits can be overcome and the scope of hybridisation extended.