MAPP is a partner in a new £1.4m project funded by Innovate UK and EPSRC in the recent Connected Digital Additive Manufacturing Call. The TACDAM project is led by Hieta Technologies and partners include Insphere, Metalysis, Renishaw, McClaren Automotive, LSN Diffusion, University of Sheffield, University of Leicester and University of Exeter.
The TACDAM project will perform targeted Additive Manufacturing (AM) pre- and post-process value chain technology developments, develop an adaptive quality assurance model, introduce parametric design as a key process variable and demonstrate the capability to deliver cost and quality outcomes at Manufacturing Readiness Level 6 to the automotive industry.

The TACDAM project will remove the final hurdles for the adoption of additive manufacturing in automotive applications in a staged low-mid-high volume approach. The essential requisite for this, besides having the right portfolio of products, is meeting automotive expectation of low cost and high quality, the delivery of which is the primary objective of the project. Although the biggest single contributor to product cost across the value chain has been Additive Manufacturing (AM) build time it is expected that by the end of 2017 substantial further increases will have been made. A result of this is that costs associated to pre- and post-processing are becoming relatively much more significant.

The work at Sheffield is led by Dr George Panoutsos with Dr Maty Katzman, Professor Visakan Kadirkamanathan and Professor Iain Todd. Key enabling technologies that will be developed, include the creation of model-based approaches, that are used to optimise the part life-cycle in the manufacturing environment. This includes the identification of key factors in the value-chain, and data-driven methodologies that will 'learn' from data towards the better fundamental understanding of the process.