The application procedure for the International Additive Manufacturing Award (IAMA) – the international award in the field of 3D printing – has begun. For what is already the second time, the two trade associations, the AMT and the VDW (German Machine Tool Builders’ Association), will be honouring fit-for-purpose innovations in additive manufacturing for industrial use. These include developing machinery concepts and important components, progress in machining processes and in material machining, new applications, data processing and measurements for quality assurance. The closing date for applications is 7 December 2015. The accolade will be awarded under the aegis of the METAV 2016 – 19th International Exhibition for Metalworking Technologies – in Düsseldorf during February 2016. The application documents can be downloaded from the internet under www.additive-ward.com.
System manufacturers, users, component suppliers, data modellers and international academics are invited to apply. The applications will be scrutinised by an international jury with high-ranking representatives from the industrial sector, the academic community, the important customer grouping of medical technology users, media and trade associations. The winner receives 20,000 US-dollars in cash, plus a media package worth 80,000 US-dollars for publicising the innovation concerned.
“Additive manufacturing will be one of the trends radically transforming the production processes of the future: it has meanwhile evolved into an autonomous technology that opens up new options to the industrial sector for manufacturing complex parts, in series if necessary,” said Dr. Wilfried Schäfer, Executive Director of the VDW. “With the IAMA, we are aiming to position current innovations and creative solutions in the field of additive manufacturing from an international viewpoint. Following a successful debut this year, we are already looking forward to numerous national and international project submissions on all subjects involved in the value creation chain,” emphasised the AMT’s President Douglas K. Woods.
The winner of the first IAMA in 2015 was the American firm Hybrid Manufacturing Technologies. The company’s innovation is a hybrid kit that can be integrated into any metalworking CNC machine: laser deposition welding thus enables metalworking, finishing and checking of parts to be performed in a single machine. Here, conventional CNC technology is combined with additive production processes, thus opening up new scenarios that hitherto neither of the two technologies was able to offer by itself.
The AMT and the VDW joined forces to inaugurate the IAMA in 2014, since the USA and Germany are key markets in the field of additive processes. This applies for the creation, use and researching of the process. Both partners possess the requisite competence and the network for bringing together the international sector within the framework of this initiative and supporting mutual feedback between experts.