Development of a Hybrid Manufacturing Cell; Integration of Additive Manufacturing with CNC Machining

The application of Additive Manufacturing (AM) for production of injection molding tools and tooling inserts enables significant improvements in regards to, for example, product quality and cycle times. However, the AM based production of tools and inserts is most often far from being rapid and the inserts are usually considerably more expensive than conventionally produced. A combination of AM with CNC milling in a hybrid process route allows for the application of each process to the production of the section of the product geometry for which it is most advantageous. However, this approach also multiplies the number of process steps and therefore also the limiting factors and possible causes of failure. This paper describes the development of a Hybrid Manufacturing cell by integration of AM with conventional CNC milling in a robust, streamlined production sequence.