Production Optimization For Additive Manufacturing Of Medical Devices (ProMED): 

Project partners 

Premet Kft. (Hungary): Premet is a Hungarian SME that produces specific medical devices and the professional application of metal 3D printing. Premet was the main experiment stakeholder. Recommended relevant optimization objectives, validated and exploited the experiment results to optimize its medical device production. 

Opendot (Italy): Opendot is an open research and innovation center that was responsible for the interface of the ProMED system with users and their databases. 

CNR-IMATI (Italy):  Institute of Applied Mathematics and Information Technology is a data model and algorithms provider in the project. CNR designed and implemented the required geometric analysis and process optimization algorithms. 

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The main objective of the experiment was to optimize the production of customized metal medical devices while considering the combined use of additive and subtractive manufacturing. This hybrid technique, often referred to as Sint & Mill (S&M), consists in creating a semi-finished product with a 3D printer and subsequently applying precision CNC milling for surface finishing. This process is known to reduce milling time up to 50% if compared to classical milling, greatly reducing material consumption, production time, and machine life-time. Despite being superior to classical manufacturing techniques, hybrid manufacturing still relies on suboptimal processing pipelines and, due to the high cost of the materials and equipment involved, it offers room for a further significant reduction of fabrication times and production costs. 

The end-user PREMET operates in a Manufacturing-as-a-Service (MaaS) context, mainly producing personalized products designed by customers such as, e.g., dental technicians. At PREMET, the duration and cost of the manufacturing process depend on the size, orientation and number of the products on the build platform. These parameters have a high influence on the production cost of a given product. A product may cost from two to five times less if it is fabricated on the same platform together with other products, when compared to the cost it would have if produced alone on ist own building platform. 

Within ProMED, the plan was to support the end-user manufacturing SME, PREMET in the difficult task of determining the optimal parameter settings for the fabrication and to develop a cloud-based decision support system that is able to simulate the behavior of the production facility, predict how long it would take to perform fabrication, support the end-user in the determination of the production costs and times. 

The decision support system should help decide how to best orient a part on the platform, based on parameters such as production time, surface quality, need for human labor, possibility of packing more products on the same building platform, etc. The system makes the user aware of how the orientation correlates with the aforementioned parameters. 

The system takes the form of a cloud-based service accessible through a standard web browser which provides a dedicated user interface. 

Project’s outcome:  

Products for implantology must be made of titanium, with high precision and smooth surface quality at given points and surfaces of the product. “Traditional” products are frames like crowns and bridges that at present are produced by molding and CNC milling; however, these are expensive and frequently face quality-related problems. 

The important technical outcome of the ProMED project is that production benefits from an optimal parameter setting driven by the decision support system that the technical partners deployed so that the same products can be fabricated more efficiently, at a lower cost, and with higher quality. The results of the experiment can be adaptable to any kind of AM enterprise, and not only for dental and medical ones. Algorithms and models can be incredibly useful, for any company looking to make 3D printing-based manufacturing economically viable. The experiment allows testing geometric algorithms on the cloud and makes it possible to assess their actual usability when integration with third-party commercial tools is required. 

By participating in the ProMED project, the Hungarian manufacturing SME, PREMET was able to improve its additive manufacturing process. For this kind of production, it is difficult to quantify the benefits, however, the partners estimated a 10-20% increase in cost savings and engineering hours, and about 3-5% in quality improvements (decrease in the number of products with defects). Optimization might also decrease raw material consumption. 

Dr Zsolt Pásztor, CEO of PREMET: 

“By participating in the DIGITBrain project we were able to improve our additive manufacturing process. With the help of the digital twin, the time needed for part preparation, production planning, and quoting has been significantly reduced.” 

Marco Attene, Senior Researcher at CNR-IMATI: 

„ProMED printing process simulation is much faster than the state of the art while giving the user full control of the expected simulation accuracy. Such an efficiency enables a completely new process planning strategy based on a quantitative comparison of costs and times needed to produce the same set of goods while changing the production settings.”