Stratasys FDM Charts New Course for Manufacturing
Here's how one company bought a rapid prototyping machine only to find it's even better suited for rapid manufacturing.
| Published July 2, 2008
 SAP designs and manufactures helmsman chairs, table columns, and other equipment for the marine industry as well as custom products for the offshore drilling industry. |
SAP (Sørlandets Aluminiumprodukter) in Kristiansand, Norway, designs and manufactures products for demanding marine environments. It produces helmsman chairs, table columns, and other equipment for the marine industry as well as custom products for the offshore industry. The team at SAP faces tight deadlines and high expectations daily and it needed a solution to speed up design without compromising accuracy.
Following its success with outsourced prototyping work, SAP decided to purchase its own rapid prototyping machine. And because of the demanding environments in which its products function, SAP’s Product Development Manager Harald Jansen says the company needed to prove out more than just aesthetics.
“Mocking up a beautiful but fragile product is one thing,” he says, “but we needed to determine more than just whether it looked nice. We needed to test fit and functionality as well.” After doing its research into additive systems, the company decided on the Stratasys FDM Vantage SE because of its capacity, the variety of performance materials available, the finish quality, and the fact that prototypes require virtually no postprocessing or hand finishing.
 Details like this, and of 25 other components on the control chair, were created in Solid Edge before being downloaded to the Stratasys FDM system. The rapid-prototyping system is now a key part of SAP’s direct digital manufacturing system. |
SAP’s first project, based entirely on prototyping, was an iterative feasibility study for a new table column with telescopic height adjustment. Over a two-week period, designers, after creating in Solid Edge, produced a dozen different models with varying designs in both polycarbonate and ABS plastic.
“The prototypes gave us the clear answers we were looking for,” says Jansen. “This was the kind of product development we wanted, and yet we had barely begun to see its potential.”
From Prototyping to Manufacturing
Prototyping turned out to be the tip of the iceberg for SAP, as it quickly learned how durable the parts could be. Andy Smith, an industrial designer with the firm, elaborates on the company’s transition from prototyping to manufacturing.
 The entire assembly for the new chair designed for an offshore oil drilling rig is shown here. This operator control chair was prototyped with the help of a Stratasys FDMVantage. Then 25 of its components were manufactured by the same machine. |
“We were struggling to meet a deadline on a series of particularly complex driller operator chairs for the offshore [drilling] industry,” says Smith. “Most of the design was completely new, yet it had to be out of the door in a matter of days. As a shortcut, the team used the Vantage machine to pump out small, intricate parts for testing. Not only were they strong and durable, the shiny black parts looked so good on the chairs that the team knew they could be more than just prototypes.
“There was absolutely no reason why they couldn’t be production parts,” says Smith. “The FDM parts simplified the designs for complex moving and interlocking mechanisms, they stood up to all our testing, and the company who ordered the chairs loved the look.” Equally important, the customer has satisfactorily integrated the product into drilling solutions in service in the North Sea.
SAP now produces hundreds of production parts — many of them unusual looking designs that would otherwise require injection molding — that are generally ready the next day. “Who would have guessed we’d be actively engaged in direct digital manufacturing on a daily basis so soon after investing in a new prototyping tool?” asks Smith.
 This control chair for an offshore oil-drilling rig combines comfort with functionality through the use of parts that were designed in Solid Edge and prototyped using an FDM system designed and manufactured by Stratasys. |  These off-shore control consoles were likewise designed in Solid Edge and prototyped using a Stratasys FDMVantage. |
According to Jansen, “We knew the Stratasys Vantage machine would cut development time, we knew it would save money, we knew it would be exciting. But we had no idea that our original plan for the prototyping machine would be turned on its head. We had anticipated that in terms of machine use, prototyping would outweigh production by a very large margin, yet today around 70 percent of the parts are for production. Compressing the design cycle like this has been nothing short of revolutionary for us.”
More Info:
SAP
Kristiansand, Norway
norsap.no
Solid Edge
Siemens PLM Software
Plano, TX
siemens.com/plm
Stratasys
Eden Prairie, MN
stratasys.com
Joe Hiemenz is technical communications and public relations manager at Stratasys, Inc. Send comments about this article to DE-Editors@ deskeng.com.