Company visit: PIM International, Vol.3 No. 3 September 2009, pages 51-56, 3160 words

Author: Nick Williams, PIM International, Shrewsbury, UK

As Fraunhofer IFAM celebrates its 40th anniversary, Nick Williams, Editor of PIM International, recently visited the institute in Bremen, Germany, and met with Dr. Frank Petzoldt, IFAM’s Deputy Director. In the following report, industry support services and longer term research activities are reviewed, as well as IFAM’s take on the outlook for the PIM industry.

The Fraunhofer Society (Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft), founded in 1949, operates more than 80 research centres in Germany, including 57 Fraunhofer Institutes. The society employs more than 15,000 people, the majority of whom are scientists and engineers. Operating as a non-profit organisation, it has an annual research budget of €1.4 billion and thanks to its clearly defined mission of application oriented research, the society plays a key role in both German and European industrial R&D activity. Affiliated research centres and offices are located elsewhere in Europe, the USA and Asia, providing essential contact with major industrial regions worldwide.

The society is named after Joseph von Fraunhofer (1787–1826), a Munich based researcher and entrepreneur famed for the discovery of the dark absorption lines, known as Fraunhofer lines, in the Sun’s spectrum.

Fraunhofer’s ability to develop practical applications from his numerous scientific discoveries, primarily in the area of precision optical instrumentation, made him a pioneer of application oriented research. It was in recognition of this aspect of his career that the Fraunhofer Society took his name......

Further sections of this article include:

- The story of IFAM
- World class research facilities
- A commitment to supporting industry
- Core R&D activities
- In-mould quality management
- MicroMIM
- The commercialisation of 2-Component PIM
- Extrusion of MIM feedstock
- The outlook for MIM

Figures and Tables:

Fig. 1 Fraunhofer IFAM’s research centre in Bremen, Germany

Fig. 2 View of the MIM laboratory’s two Elnik sintering furnaces

Fig. 3 Laboratory view showing the Arburg 320S 2C-injection moulding machine

Fig. 4 IFAM’s MIM laboratory

Fig. 5 IFAM’s Battenfeld MicroSystem50 micro injection moulding workstation

Fig. 6 Fig. A micro injection moulding tool used in the MicroSystem50

Fig. 7 MicroMIM 316L parts (Fraunhofer IFAM in co-operation with Scholz GmbH, Kronach, Germany)

Fig. 8 SIGMA calculation of temperature distribution during injection moulding of a micro part

Fig. 9 Superelastic nickel-titanium components by MIM: left) Micro tensile test specimens and demonstrators for sealing devices, which were sintered to maximize density, right) Micrographs of fully dense and highly porous sample in comparison