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Siemens: The industrialisation of AM
Siemens: Digitalisation enables the industrialisation of metal Additive Manufacturing at Finspång As one of the world’s largest industrial companies, Siemens has experienced first hand the process of taking metal AM from the R&D laboratory to the series production of critical components for its power generation business. Today, it is supporting the global industrialisation of the technology through its Siemens NX Additive Manufacturing software. In the following report the company’s Aaron Frankel and Ashley Eckhoff explain their belief that, whilst the potential of AM is massive, digitalisation will play a critical role in enabling its transition from a prototyping tool to a serial production technology.
The centuries-old city of Finspång, on the banks of Skutbosjön Lake, Sweden, has been a centre of industry since the 16th century, when local factories produced cannon and cannonballs for the country’s military. In 2018, Finspång’s economy is still driven by industry, and the city is home to a number of metal processing plants and gas turbine production facilities. It is within the gas turbine industry in this small municipality, 180 km southwest of Stockholm, where the future is being additively manufactured. The major employer in this industry, and in this area, is Siemens, which manufactures gas turbines at an innovative, cutting edge production facility in the city (Fig. 1). To understand why these innovations are occurring in Finspång today, it is important to understand the city’s history. Cannon manufacturing spanned nearly four centuries and evolved by the 1890s to become a major industry, with the last cannon being produced in Finspång in 1911. In 1913, the city entered the modern industrial age with the inception of turbine production. By 1955, the
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gas turbine business had begun and, by the 1980s, the resultant medium-sized gas turbines, capable of generating from fifteen to sixty megawatts, were being used in new and aftermarket applications.
The new millennium brought a rapid succession of changes to the Finspång facility. Beginning in 2008, Siemens started to explore Additive Manufacturing as a means to accelerate gas turbine innovation. As the
Fig. 1 A view of a gas turbine under construction in Siemens’ Finspång facility
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