WionDrive News Desk 
The BMW Group has over thirty years of experience and knowledge on how to make efficient use of additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing. The concept of 3D printers has been used in manufacturing of customised parts of automobiles since 1991 in concept cars and prototypes and then in racing cars, followed by serial production vehicles. Today, BMW Group not only applies 3D printing in the production of parts needed in their automobiles but in manufacturing various special operating aids and manufacturing tools for its molecular structures.
In the 2023 fiscal year, the company had over 300,000 parts produced solely through 3D printing from its headquarters in Oberschleißheim, known as the “Additive Manufacturing Campus”, which serves as the central facility for the BMW Group for Additive Manufacturing, research, and training. This applies internationally as effectively, with printing more than 100,000 parts per annum at several BMW Group manufacturing sites including Spartanburg and Asian facilities.
It is at this BMW Group Plant Landshut that the application of AM procedures is a regular necessity, most prominent in instance of generating an aluminium cylinder head mould through sand casting procedure. This involves the addition of more layers of sand held together with bonders this makes it easy to produce more complex moulds which contain liquefied aluminium.
However, the technological development represented by the Lightweight Construction and Technology Centre in Landshut offers a perfect vision of a number of directions; the 3D- printed gripper element used here reaches as much as 120 kilograms. This gripper in particular has been produced in 22 hours and it helps to ease workload regarding the operation of robots that deal with CFRP roofs for BMW M GmbH models making their operation easier and increasing the lifespan of the equipment at the same time.
To sustain the pursuit for improvement, new lightweight grippers of the next generation were introduced in the summer of 2023. In the BMW Group Plant in Munich, the company is using advanced manufacturing technology further to its advancement through integrating bionic robot grippers successfully. These grippers, capable of manipulating entire floor assemblies for BMW i4 vehicles, mark yet another stride towards automotive manufacturing excellence.
