Small series and functional samples are becoming increasingly important for upcoming productions. This is evident in areas with high material costs, such as high-temperature applications. In particular, there is a high potential for optimisation in stamping and fine blanking of complex geometries in order to reduce stamping waste and thus production costs.

For an existing high-temperature application, fine blanking blanks are conventionally produced by punching from sheet metal. In this project, the conventional production of these blanks was replaced by a Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing (WAAM) process. WAAM enables material-saving additive manufacturing of geometries with low process complexity using wire as the starting material.

In the course of the project, hollow cylinders were additive manufactured from Alloy 625, a Ni-based superalloy. After heat treatment, electrical discharge machining was used to cut these in to rings which represent the finished blanks. Like the conventional blanks, these AM-blanks were shaped into the final geometry in a fine blanking process.

The advantages and disadvantages of the AM-process were determined by comparing the finished components in terms of geometric accuracy, microstructure, texture and pore content. For this, metallographic cuts, hardness impressions as well as light and electron microscopy images were made.