German national rail giant Deutsche Bahn is looking to print spare parts for its vast army of trains. That should reduce the costs for repairing their trains.
The German government has brought together different companies in Germany with the hope that they cooperate to produce 3D printed spare parts for trains. The name of the working group is “Mobility goes Additive”, headed by Stefanie Bricwede.
In the beginning they want to print parts out of metal, but for the future their aim is to develop new materials to replace metal parts with durable plastics. Of cause that’s not possible for all parts but it will be for some parts, and 3D printing plastics is a lot easier and cheaper than printing metal. There are issues because there are no CAD data available for some of the over 40 year old trains. So bevor printing spare parts the broken parts have to be scanned and then a model for printing the parts can be generated.
To get to this goals a lot of big companies have teamed up, for example there are Deutsche Bahn, Siemens, SLM and VoestAlpine. All of these companies have invested in 3D printing lately and now want to work together to reduce to costs for spare parts for one of the biggest and most advanced railroad networks of the world.
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