Award-winning 3D-printing innovation from Paderborn: AMendate

Paderborn, 25 June 2018 - AMendate, a young company based in Paderborn, has developed an innovative software that makes it possible to create optimal parts for 3D printing almost fully automatically. With their idea, the team qualified for the renowned Rapid.Tech Start-up Award in June against a competition of over 30 teams and won second place.

The prize was awarded at the leading trade fair Rapid.Tech, one of the most important information platforms in the field of additive manufacturing with over 200 exhibitors. AMendate was also represented here for the first time with its own exhibition stand and was able to present itself with its innovation to the professional audience of the industrial and creative 3D-printing sector. In a ten-minute pitch and with an entirely successful exhibition stand, AMendate convinced the top-class jury of international business representatives of its idea. The team thus won second place in the Start-up Award with a prize of 2,000 euros. In addition, the young entrepreneurs receive a mentoring from Carl Fruth, CEO of FIT AG and visionary for the development of additive manufacturing.

Thomas Reiher, co-founder of AMendate, is very satisfied: "We are very happy about this great award for our still quite young software. The award and the booth at the Rapid.Tech attracted a lot of attention and the award of the jury shows us and our customers that we are working on something very valuable. Through the exchange with interested parties, potential customers and partners, we can now let our product continue to mature in a targeted manner".

The idea for the development of the software came to the university employees during their research: 3D-printing offers many possibilities for lightweight construction through the cost-efficient production of bionic structures. However, there is a lack of easy-to-use software that is designed for additive manufacturing and can generate these complex structures. First experiments with own algorithms quickly achieved promising results. Numerous discussions with developers and users led the team to the decision to advance this idea more intensively and to convert it into a product. The most important unique selling points are the automatic retransition of the optimization result to common CAD models and the considerable time reduction through a complete automation of the otherwise manually laborious process.

More about AMendate:

AMendate is a team consisting of members of the research group of Prof. Rainer Koch (C.I.K.), which develops a fully automated software for topology optimization of technical components with focus on additive manufacturing. Their work at the DMRC, the research center for additive manufacturing at Paderborn University , gave rise to the idea of designing software to exploit the potential of this versatile technology and to optimize products accordingly. This is also reflected in their name: AMendate is a combination of the Latin term emendatio (optimization) and the abbreviation 'AM' for the expression additive manufacturing. With the help of TecUp, the young team applied for an EXIST scholarship and will move into garage33 in July in order to be able to found a company and offer their product on the market in a timely manner.

The software is characterized by an advanced algorithm that creates bionic-looking structures with smooth, optimally shaped surfaces. The result is a highly reliable product that is perfectly adapted to the operating conditions and only uses material where it is needed. The lightweight design achieved as a result saves valuable resources in production and operation.

AMendate-Team; Source: Julia Wegge Universität Paderborn