Aim of the paper is to show a new concept for a customized production system for flexible design and manufacturing of individualized multi material structures with specific lightweight specifications and loads. Motivation of this work is the trend of individualization of consumer products and production batches even of complex products down to one. Ideas of the new solution is to develop a solution for a profile based lightweight frame design for variable applications e.g. for medicine products, sport vehicles and mobility systems. Additive manufacturing is one possible solution for this but the large sized structures are ineffective and cost intensive for this manufacturing processes.
So basis of the new production chain is at first the incremental forming of thin walled high strength steel and aluminum metal profiles by flexible production methods. The forming processes are incremental tube and profile forming and allow to manufacture flexible bends, cross-sections geometries, wall thicknesses and surface structures over the longitudinal axis [1, 2].
The second fundamental step of the manufacturing chain is a joining system realized by a robot based 6 axis polymer printing method. So nods and other details of the profile based structures are can be manufactured with the flexibility of additive manufacturing. This makes it possible to design a composite metal polymer frame within a customized approach. The individual design specifications are integrated in a special optimization concept that connects the lightweight and load requirements with the process limits of the manufacturing and automation technology.
The paper focuses on the results of the interaction between the forming and the joining by additive forming.
As a demonstrator for this study an individual designed lightweight bicycle frame is used.