Description
The goal of this activity is to develop a low cost additive manufacturing based electroforming technique and demonstrate productioncost and mass savings.
Targeted improvements: Cost reduction and productivity increase by 25%, Mass saving of 10%.
Many RF passive hardware could be produced as single piece part and without the need of tuning if low cost high precision manufacturing techniques were available with a fast turn-around time. Today this is not the case and high precision manufacturing always comes with a tag of high cost and long lead times.
In this activity a novel high precision end-to-end manufacturing technique shall be developed based on additive manufacturing techniques that allow micrometre precision mandrels to be produced and dissolved within a few hours. Targeted are RF passive hardware such as waveguide routing, feed components, Ka-band filters and diplexer which are needed in high volumes and Q / V / W-band passive components which require precision manufacturing. This eliminates the two driving cost factors of standard high precision fabrication, i. e. machine setup-up time and very long fabrication time.
In addition mass savings are possible due to the elimination of mechanical interfaces and screws and the freedom gained by the use of an additive manufactured kernel allows novel and optimised RF designs.
Existing solutions to achieve a silver plated surface shall be integrated in the end-to-end manufacturing process that eliminates the challenges of surface treatment of internal parts. The activity shall also address solutions to integrate RF interfaces (e. g. flanges). Several demonstrators shall be built and tested to fully evaluate the techniques and concepts developed.
The following work logic is foreseen:
1. Survey of state of art kernel manufacturing and surface treatment techniques.
2. Proof of concept of selected manufacturing techniques.
3. Definition of end to end manufacturing process including integration of the silver plated surfaces and RF interfaces .
4. Design, Manufacturing and testing of demonstrator components.
Tender Specifics