Bosch Invests in Metal 3D Printing Center

With a new metal 3D printer at its Nuremberg plant, Bosch wants to bolster its pioneering role in the supplier industry. It is the first Tier-1 automotive supplier in Europe to have a facility in this performance class. The plant has invested almost €6 million in the center and the associated purchase and installation of a Nikon SLM Solutions NXG XII 600 metal 3D printer.

“Bosch remains committed to Germany as an industrial location and is investing large sums of money here. By introducing new technologies in our plants, we are securing considerable sales potential,” said Klaus Mäder, a member of the Bosch Mobility sector board. The new 3D printer is intended to accelerate development cycles, especially for metal parts, which take a long time to make using conventional manufacturing processes.“

By making the manufacture of metal parts faster and more productive, this new facility will increase our competitiveness.” The technical plant manager Jörg Luntz adds: “With this facility, we are setting the highest standards in metal 3D printing. In volume production, this will open up completely new possibilities for us,” said Alexander Weichsel, the commercial plant manager in Nuremberg.

Working from a computer-aided design file developed in advance, twelve lasers melt metal powder layer by layer to create highly complex shapes. The new metal 3D printer is up to five times faster than the 3D printing systems that have been used up to now. Complex structures such as interior or curved channels, which are simply not feasible with conventional milling processes, can now be produced without any problem.

While drilling around corners is not possible using conventional methods, 3D printing makes light work of this. The printer can produce unfinished parts on demand with no need for tooling. And because 3D printing slashes raw-material waste to almost zero, it also conserves resources. “Using the 3D printer to manufacture components not only increases sustainability in production but also enables Bosch to respond flexibly to fluctuations in batch sizes and offer everything from a single source,” Weichsel says.

At full capacity, the facility can produce metal parts with a total weight of around 10,000 kilograms in under a year, achieving speeds of up to 1,000 cubic centimeters per hour. The main aim of this faster component production is to cut the time to market. “We want to be faster than with traditional manufacturing processes and use this technology to get products to market more quickly,” Luntz says. This opens the door to completely new opportunities and possibilities in the automotive sector, but also other industries such as energy and aviation.