Meet Our Partner: Fraunhofer IWU

Meet Our Partner

Additive manufacturing is expected to be more sustainable. The problem, as Florian Bittner puts it, is that resource consumption in manufacturing is still not known for all processes — and you cannot improve what you have not measured.

Meet Fraunhofer IWU, the Fraunhofer Institute for Machine Tools and Forming Technology, part of the Fraunhofer Society. The institute works across production engineering and has been doing metal additive manufacturing since 2009, along the whole digital and physical process chain. In this interview, Florian Bittner, research fellow and materials scientist at Fraunhofer IWU, explains why the institute joined DIAMETER, what it means to lead the acquisition of real manufacturing data in Work Package 1, and how Fraunhofer contributes to Pilot Case 5 with the laser powder bed fusion of an Inconel turbine blade specimen.

Fraunhofer IWU's Strategic Contribution to DIAMETER

Fraunhofer IWU works along the whole digital and physical process chain in additive manufacturing — material selection, process development and optimisation, part design, and prototype manufacturing. Sustainability in production being one of the keys to future manufacturing in Europe, and resource consumption still unknown for many processes, DIAMETER's aim matched the institute's own research agenda closely.

Within the project, Fraunhofer IWU's role covers two areas:

Real-World Impact

For Florian, what makes DIAMETER exciting is how it brings together production engineers, data scientists, and life cycle assessment experts around one shared vision: making production in Europe more sustainable.

He sees the project's outcome as an AI-assisted tool that lets engineers factor sustainability in alongside technical and economic constraints, without needing in-depth knowledge of every possible production process — and hopes to carry these results forward to Fraunhofer's industrial partners, helping make them fit for future production in Europe.

Watch the full interview to discover how Fraunhofer IWU is measuring what sustainable manufacturing actually costs.

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