Research institutes and companies from Lower Saxony have jointly developed a giant 3D printer. It can produce steel components weighing several tons – and is intended to save resources in production. Manufacturing individual large-scale components is usually an energy- and material-intensive affair. In the "XXL3DDruck" project, scientists at the Laser Zentrum Hannover (LZH) have joined forces with partners to test a more resource-efficient way of producing XXL components. To this end, they produced parts of a ship gearbox housing with a mass of up to three tons layer by layer in an oversized 3D printer using a laser-assisted arc welding process.
