Continental offers a broad portfolio of solutions, including the production of automotive parts, connectivity, automated driving and mobility services through its Continental Engineering Services (CES) division. Cost-effectiveness and speed are key to its production success, and this has led the company to the use of additive manufacturing.

The company has its own Additive Design and Manufacturing (ADaM) Competence Center. Both internal and external customers receive a wide range of additively manufactured samples, mechanical components and solutions for series production with metal or plastic assemblies. The ADaM Competence Center is home to an industrial-grade, FDM-based Stratasys Fortus 450mc 3D printer. This produces final components, prototypes and, above all, tools and devices for the company's own production machines.

Individual components made from modern materials

Crucial to the company's production capacities are various specialized additive manufacturing materials with which the team can produce individual solutions for the production line - for example Ultem 9085 Resin and the ESD-compliant ABS-ESD7 from Stratasys.

When manufacturing automotive parts and solutions for customers, Continental Engineering Services works with a large number of electronic parts and components in production. Antistatic properties are therefore of paramount importance for all machine parts that come into contact with electronic components. It prevents static discharges that can damage products, impair their performance or even lead to an explosion or fire. For the many tools and fixtures manufactured in-house at Continental, the ABS-ESD7 material meets the necessary standards for electrostatic discharge when handling sensitive electronic components, while offering durability and stability.

One of these applications is car displays. "We can produce the bonding device for the car display using 3D printing from the ABS-ESD7 material from Stratasys. This gives us a fast, safe and ESD-compliant in-house solution that can be customized," says Kammann. "This not only ensures continuous fast production, but also shows how we look for the best technology to solve the manufacturing problems we face."

For Continental, the production speed of the Fortus 450mc is a valuable asset in speeding up the process and ensuring continuous automotive production. Tools and components can be produced on demand in a matter of hours - the team can set print jobs to run overnight and have the finished parts available the next morning. This allows Continental to produce more flexibly, especially for spare parts.

"With the Fortus 450mc, we are able to quickly manufacture replacement production tools and components from high performance thermoplastics that deliver the same performance we would expect from a traditionally manufactured equivalent," says Kammann. "Importantly, this avoids the lengthy production times associated with traditionally manufactured tools and bypasses costly machine downtime associated with waiting for spare parts. Instead, we can ensure continuous production and have little or no machine downtime."

Yann Rageul, Head of Manufacturing Business Unit, EMEA and Asia at Stratasys comments: "The current global economic situation continues to be problematic. Additive manufacturing plays a key role in the much-needed efficiency of companies' product development process. More and more materials are now available. This allows manufacturers to meet the high demands of challenging traditional production applications and add further customization benefits to the process. It's great to see companies like Continental using additive manufacturing in their operations to overcome production issues while ensuring that service quality is maintained for customers. From a strategic perspective, this is essential for our customers and most companies right now."