Power Protection for Additive Manufacturing Operations

Additive Manufacturing (AM) is transformational. Across many sectors it already provides quality improvements, faster speed of production, greater flexibility, and reduced costs as well as being more suited to circular economics and decentralised manufacture.

But it is yet to grow to true industrial scale. By some estimates it is growing at around 25% per year from a base of between $15bn and $20bn. The market is expected to at least double by 2030.

Transforming some parts of traditional heavy manufacturing sectors could take decades. For parts of aerospace, automotive and the renewable energy sector transformation to AM has already begun and rapid adoption will only take a few years.

What is clear is that as it scales AM will require ever more sustainable, reliable energy and power back up.  Active Power was quick to recognise the growth potential and the unique AM challenges for sustainable, reliable power provision. In every AM process it is obvious that any power disturbance may be catastrophic to a batch and potentially cause it to be scrapped entirely.

For invaluable insight into how to avoid such risks the Active Power White Paper “Power Protection for Additive Manufacturing Operations” explores these challenges and provides insight and technical explanations of why Flywheel UPS energy provision and back up are ideally suited for AM.

For some AM simply equals the $6bn 3D printing market. In fact, many different AM processes are rapidly evolving as the number of applications grows exponentially.

The American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) group “ASTM F42 – Additive Manufacturing”, formulated a set of standards that classify the range of Additive Manufacturing processes into 7 categories: VAT Photopolymerization; Material Jetting; Binder Jetting; Material Extrusion; Powder Bed Fusion; Sheet Lamination; Directed Energy Deposition.

For facilities and operations managers, consultant engineers, specifiers and operators who must meet the power challenges in AM the Active Power White paper provides detailed cost analysis of UPS ownership, usage and operations comparisons with chemical based solutions – including output speed, performance and reliability comparisons. It addresses the major power concerns including voltage sags, surges, harmonic distortion, and low power factor and reveals how CleanSource UPS features a true parallel online topology enabled by the flywheel, addressing all types of power quality issues over decades of operation.