Additive Industries reveals the winners of its Design for Additive Manufacturing Challenge
March 15, 2018
Aidro Hydraulics, winner in the professional category of the challenge (from left to right: Valeria Tirelli, CEO, and Gaetano Corrado, AM Specialist)
Additive Industries, Eindhoven, the Netherlands, revealed the winners of its Design for Additive Manufacturing Challenge during an awards dinner at the 6th Additive World Conference. In the professional category, the winner was Italy’s Aidro Hydraulics, and the student prize was awarded to Yogeshkumar Katrodiya, a Master’s student at Fraunhofer IGCV, Germany.
For the challenge, Valeria Tirelli, Aidro Hydraulics CEO, presented a compact redesign of a generic hydraulic manifold for a street cleaning vehicle. Designed by Gaetano Corrado, the redesigned component consolidated two parts into one at a smaller scale than the existing manifold and achieved optimised flow thanks to the incorporation of improved, curved channels.
The redesign also addressed the problem of fluid leakage in the original part, which was caused by auxiliary plug failure, and reduced the weight of the part by 70%. According to the Additive Manufacturing Challenge jury, Aidro Hydraulics was recognised for the “massive applicability and commercial viability of their design.”
Katrodiya won for his design of a fully integrated shaft and gear with internal channels transporting lubricant to the gears for cooling. Helix-shaped cooling channels were applied to increase the cooling capacity, taking full advantage of the geometric freedom offered by Additive Manufacturing in comparison to more traditional technologies.
By consolidating the parts of the component and optimising the component topology, Katrodiya stated that he obtained a weight reduction of 50%. The jury stated that this entry was rewarded for the “generic applicability and the large number of potential applications” of the design.
All six challenge finalists received a one-year license for Altair’s Inspire and Autodesk’s Netfabb software. Katrodiya, as student winner, was awarded an Ultimaker 2+ polymer AM system while the Aidro Hydraulics team were awarded an Ultimaker 3.
