KraussMaffei enters additive manufacturing

With the launch of two new 3D printing technologies, plastics machinery manufacturer KraussMaffei Technologies GmbH is adding a fourth pillar to its current portfolio of plastics production options.

At an unveiling event Oct. 19 at its booth (Hall 15, D24/C24) at K 2022, the company revealed that it was stepping into additive manufacturing with the introduction of its new, room-sized powerPrint and the smaller precisionPrint machines; the first targeted at large-format industrial additive manufacturing, the second at industrial scale automated production.

"Using our expertise from series production of plastic parts, we are designing efficient system concepts and appropriate solutions for every component, regardless of the technology," said Michael Ruf, CEO of KraussMaffei. "It's taking our capacity for productivity, quality and efficiency in industrial plastics processing and applying it to additive manufacturing solutions."

The powerPrint is an extruder-based system that processes thermoplastic granulate, explained Michael Helneder, head of Additive Manufacturing Customer Success at KraussMaffei. "It can handle objects up to 10 cubic meters in size. We saw a lot of applications in the modern market for this large-format production."

Its fast printing speed also enables short throughput times for these large components, he emphasized. The powerPrint can also process fiber-reinforced plastics and compounds.

The precisionPrint, by contrast, is an automated, stereolithography-based solution that uses printing resins to produce parts with high surface quality and detail resolution, that are cured by laser.

According to Helneder, it offers cost-efficient production and high outputs, with nearly no material loss and "great design possibilities."

The machines are being supplied as complete solutions, helping customers to achieve material and cost savings, with no expensive test prints needed — "first time right," said Helneder.

The printers are not yet available on the market. Beta testing will first be conducted next year, after which they will be released to a wider audience. KraussMaffei expects the machines to actually hit the market sometime in the second or third quarter of 2023.

Earlier in the day, the company also held its K 2022 news conference in which it presented its other news, positioning itself as a "sustainable innovation driver."

No business survives over the long term without reinventing itself and KraussMaffei is no exception. The company celebrates its 185th anniversary in 2023, having seen many changes over the course of the long years throughout its transformation from a locomotive builder to a major player in the plastics industry. And today, it is once again adapting and adjusting to the today's challenges, the first and foremost of which is to achieve climate neutrality in eight years, Ruf said.

"KraussMaffei always keeps its responsibility for current and future generations in mind. That is why we are building the new KraussMaffei," Ruf said. "Additive manufacturing fits ideally with this."

Next year's anniversary, he said, will mark the beginning of a new, sustainable era: in eight years, by 2030, the entire company will be climate neutral.

To get there, it has mapped out a tight schedule of goals, starting with achieving the Silver sustainability rating from EcoVadis in 2023, and then by 2025, becoming one of the best machine system manufacturers for the plastics industry in the areas of sustainability and cost-effectiveness.

The company plans to reach EcoVadis Gold status by 2027 and in 2030, to have reduced its corporate carbon footprint to zero, with all plants worldwide operating in a CO2-neutral manner.

Finally, by 2035, it will realize a Product Carbon Footprint of zero, manufacturing all machines in a CO2-neutral manner. KraussMaffei's tagline at K 2022 — "We make plastic green" — underscores these aims for increasingly sustainable production. Sustainability is an added value, "for us and for our customers," Ruf said.

Next to adding new products and technologies, KraussMaffei is physically renewing itself. The company, long established in Munich, has embarked on a new location strategy involving the relocation of four sites to larger and more modern production facilities — that at the same time serve to communicate the company's sustainability strategy in a visible way. The entire project involves a three-digit-million euro investment — "more than 100 million," said Ruf — in total, a sign, he added of the company's Chinese owners' commitment to KraussMaffei and its technology. The first two new plants, in JiaXing, near Shanghai and in Einbeck, Germany, where KraussMaffei's subsidiary Burgsmüller produces important core components for extruders, have been in operation since 2020, and now, after two years of construction, KraussMaffei in September 2022 received the keys to the new extrusion and recycling technology center in Laatzen, near Hanover. That facility spans around 97,000 meters and offers space for up to 750 workplaces for the production of extrusion systems and recycling equipment for the plastics and rubber processing industries. The new site has been designed as a Smart Factory complete with consistently networked production, data processing in real time, process visualization and data evaluation, enabling significant increases in production efficiency. It is here that, among others, "we are going to work on a variety of digital products designed to optimize the energy efficiency of our customers' machine utilization," Ruf noted. Relocation started in July and is expected to be completed by December.

In addition, KraussMaffei is moving its headquarters to Parsdorf, east of Munich. Both the new plant in Laatzen and the new group headquarters have been built to the highest environmental standards. This means modern building technology with planted parking garages and one of the largest roof-mounted photovoltaic systems in Europe, a combined heat and power plant, heating and cooling sails in the offices, active hall ventilation and intelligent LED lighting with light and motion sensors. Both sites are certified according to the DGNB German Association for Sustainable Building system.

These are huge investments, especially in these times of inflation and high energy costs, although the outlook for KraussMaffei is not worrying: in the first quarter of 2022, order intake was just under 370 million euros — an increase of 27 percent compared to the prior-year quarter.

The circular economy is a supporting pillar of KraussMaffei's corporate strategy, without which neither the company nor its customers will achieve their ambitious sustainability goals. Its recycling systems, for example, which include mechanical as well as solvent-based and chemical processes, are based on more than three decades of experience have helped customers to recycle more than one million tons of plastics over the years.

As well, the company is continually working to improve the design of its products, striving for improved quality with less energy and material input.

At K 2022, KraussMaffei is presenting, among others, its BluePower servo drive, which optimizes the requirement/energy consumption of the pumps. KraussMaffei is also showcasing its new precisionMolding and powerMolding injection molding machine series. The precisionMolding model is the basic, all-electric PX series machine with a reduced number of options, while powerMolding is the counterpart of KraussMaffei's hydraulic GX series. Both are ideal for standard applications, such as technical parts, electric and electronic devices, and the automotive, packaging or medical industry. Both machines were introduced previously in Asia, where they have been very successful, said Xiaojun Cui, executive vice president for new machines business at KraussMaffei.

The company is also presenting its digital solutions such as APCplus, which controls the component weight for each cycle individually, and dataXplorer, which can assign the energy consumption to each individual process step and serves as the interface to an energy management system; also, socialProduction, the latest member of this product family "which acts as a health check for our machine components," as Klaus Jell, the new executive vice president of the digital & service solutions division described it. In combination with smartAssist, this makes it possible to respond to problems in real time. smartAssist is a mobile audio and video communication system with augmentation that can also be used with smart glasses to carry out remotely guided maintenance, while with socialProduction, the production process of the injection molding machines is continuously monitored by a patented, self-learning process.