Reproducible quality for individual parts, spare parts or series production.
Additive manufacturing is the opposite of material-removing, subtractive manufacturing, in which the desired object is carved out of a block of material. In additive manufacturing (AM, German: additive manufacturing), the end product is built and created layer by layer with the help of various materials and a 3D printer.
FKM stands for functional additively manufactured components that must meet the same mechanical requirements as a series component to be replaced or at the end of product development. For this reason, from the very beginning – since 1994 – we have relied on the powder bed-based additive manufacturing processes Selective Laser Sintering for the plastics sector and Selective Laser Melting for the metal sector.
Even though colloquially it is usually referred to as a 3D printed component, the term additive manufacturing means that it is a production process of its own, at the end of which there are real components or resilient functional prototypes that are manufactured in reproducible and assured quality.