Programming and Evaluation of a Multi-Axis/Multi-Process Manufacturing System for Mechatronic Integrated Devices

Additive manufacturing technologies open up new paths in the production of Mechatronic Integrated Devices (MID) and enable rapid and cost-efficient fabrication of demonstrators and customer-specific applications with lot size one. The MID technology is used in many applications in the automotive, medical and telecommunication industry and allows a high amount of functional integration. In this work, a 5-axis all in one machine is used to combine Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) for the additive manufacturing of substrates, a Piezojet print head for generating circuit tracks as well as a vacuum pipette for placing surface mounted devices (SMDs). Conductive paths can be printed with Piezojet on arbitrary freeform surfaces because of the high possible working distance. After the printing process of the part is completed, the utilized conductive silver paste is cured in a convection oven. The SMDs are placed directly into the liquid paste, which also contains adhesives. The 5-axis motion system enables the mounting of components at any position of a hemisphere. On the software side, a CAD/CAM system is extended by a slicer, printed electronics functionality and Pick and Place operations in order to allow the generation of one single machine program for the automatic manufacturing of mechatronic products. A machine simulation is programmed to validate generated programs before executing them on the real system. All tools are mounted in the system simultaneously and are activated by tool change commands in the NC program.