Small changes, Big impact - How to embed safety into rapid development and scale-up of processes

Additive manufacturing is a new manufacturing technology to produce parts which are used in both, research and production plants at BASF. The focus is to use the new freedom of design to facilitate a more effective and efficient way of producing chemicals. The BASF division Global Engineering Services built an Additive Manufacturing Center and set up a team who has in the past 6 years been fabricating components with a main focus on metal alloys. Currently the material focus is on stainless steel and corrosive-resistant nickel-based alloys.

In process industry, pressure equipment poses particularly high technical requirements in terms of component integrity, safety and certification.

Therefore, certification is crucial for additive manufacturing to become an accepted manufacturing technology for pressure equipment.

The Technical Inspection at BASF SE in their role as Notified Body (user inspectorate) has certified an additively manufactured autoclave (PS: 225 bar, TS: 300°C) as a pressure equipment for the first time. This equipment conforms to the European Pressure Equipment Directive (2014/68/EU).

In this talk, the presenter will give an overview about the established Additive Manufacturing Center and the first operational experiences with pressure equipment. In addition, the range of available material and their qualification approaches will be introduced.