Remote additive manufacturing control for industrial 3D printing using a secure central control platform

The Challenge

Additive manufacturing (AM) shop floors typically run machines from multiple manufacturers, each with its own proprietary control stack — and they require technicians physically on site to launch and manage builds. The Covid-19 pandemic exposed how fragile this is: social distancing and lockdowns threatened to halt production of critical components, including medical parts that cannot be manufactured locally at medical facilities, and put technical jobs across the AM industry at risk.

The Solution

The RAM-Ctrl project (Remote Additive Manufacturing Control for Uninterrupted Facility Management) developed vendor-agnostic remote-control systems and procedures for AM operations and facility management. NquiringMinds, with AM consultancy from TWI, built a local, scalable central control platform (CCP) to manage multiple AM systems from different machine manufacturers, and a remote control hub (RCH) through which technicians access the CCP and manage AM builds remotely — delivering remote commands to manipulate AM systems, launch build files, and securely and efficiently transfer AM build files between different AM platforms.

Outcomes

The project demonstrated the approach end to end by remotely manufacturing a metal medical demo part via the CCP and RCH. The solution is designed to shorten production time, simplify supply-chain complexity for critical medical components, improve productivity and facility-management efficiency on multi-vendor AM shop floors, and enable remote-working procedures that protect technical jobs during health crises requiring social distancing or lockdowns.