Additive Manufacturing Process for the Production of Glass Fibre Bushings

Glass fibres play a key role in technologies of great commercial importance such as multilayer printed circuit boards (PCBs), composite wind turbine blades, and lightweight boats. Glass fibre bushings made of PtRh alloys form a critical part of the glass fibre production process. Both in terms of design and quality, traditional manufacturing methods such as milling, drilling, and welding limit the potential of such bushings. It is the goal of this work to evaluate a novel manufacturing method for the production of glass fibre bushings, namely additive manufacturing (AM), to provide a means to overcome current deficits in bushing design and manufacturing. To date, the use of additively manufactured bushings for the production of glass fibres has not yet been investigated systematically. In this work, a three-step approach for the investigation of the key research questions is applied. In the first step, the technical feasibility of the use of additively manufactured bushings is evaluated. Secondly, the design freedoms of the additive manufacturing technology are explored in a design exploitation study concerning a key deficit in the state of the art: tip packing density. In a final step, the economic feasibility of the additive manufacturing process for bushings is evaluated through a cost calculation based on full cost accounting principles