Use Cases

Assembly

OECHSLER’s Electric Parking Brake - Success story

We provide sophisticated solutions, based on 20 years of experience in actuator development, prototyping, and manufacturing.

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Pulverspritzguss

Ceramic Injection Molding at OECHSLER

Ceramic Injection Molding combines functionality and design for high-quality parts with excellent material characteristics and haptics.

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Industrien

Product Carbon Footprint

OECHSLER hat datengestützte Transparenz über seinen Product Carbon Footprint geschaffen und die größte Emissionsquelle identifiziert.

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Kunststoffspritzguss

Rapid Tooling in the tool making department of OECHSLER AG

With a metal printer, OECHSLER produces tools on demand - with complex cavities or conformal cooling shortening product innovation cycles.

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Additive Fertigung

TECHART and OECHSLER bring innovative, lightweight seating solutions to racetracks

TECHART and OECHSLER enable superior design and seating comfort for high-performance cars with additively manufactured upholstery.

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Kunststoffspritzguss

e³ sustainable lighting

OECHSLER und Brighthub GmbH arbeiten zusammen, um die Beleuchtungsindustrie mit e³ sustainable lighting zu revolutionieren.

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Additive Fertigung

STRAUSS launches sustainable high-tech workwear parts from the 3D printer

STRAUSS teamed up with OECHSLER to rethink existing workwear and manufacture knee pads fully driven by additive manufacturing technology.

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Additive Fertigung

Bike saddle reimagined

Specialized, Carbon & OECHSLER rethink bike saddles by using latest scientific results and innovative production technologies.

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Additive Fertigung

Jack Wolfskin Combines Exceptional Padding and Ventilation in Aerorise Backpack

Together with OECHSLER and Carbon, Jack Wolfskin revolutionized the backpack market and delivered a perfect back pad solution.

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Additively Manufactured ski goggle

OECHSLER sets new standards in the sporting goods market

Use Case herunterladen

Application

Substitution of a conventional multi-component ski goggles frame by a single component one

Why OECHSLER

Development, simulation, and production out of one hand

Material used

TPU

The result

All functions wrapped up in a comfortable and flexible single component frame

OECHSLER enables the additive manufacturing of multi-functional single component solutions, which can fulfill ambivalent material characteristics by part design.

Can you guess how many parts one skiing goggle uses? 13. Isn't this a dramatically high number for such a standard sporting goods article? In our perspective, the multiplicity of parts leads to a higher failure potential during production, higher risk of product failure, and ultimately higher costs. As the winter season began, we rethought this and set new standards which lead to fewer parts, more comfort, and functionality. This whole process took us just about a week – from product design to production.

Paving the way

Simplifying the process

As a partner of innovation, OECHSLER is continuously striving for creative solutions to increase the function, comfort, and production effectiveness of products. The project “skiing goggles” was facing a multitude of challenges: the used PU foam should be replaced by an additively manufactured lattice structure, the number of parts should be minimized to the bare minimum and the wearing comfort increased. To reach this goal the development team used a reverse-engineering approach: This meant dismantling standard skiing goggles to gain a detailed understanding of every single component and its function.

In the first dismounting step the team disassembled the lens swap including the rotatable element for lens removal. This element is necessary in case the lenses need to be changed – either due to weather conditions or simply due to renewal. Of course, this is a basic need new glasses must fulfill. Afterwards, the outer frame, which is held by clips, was dismounted. This uncovered the foam as well as the inner layers of the goggle revealing that the foams are glued together – a production step OECHSLER intends to eliminate. In the last step, the buckets holding the elastic band were removed.

Additive series production enables to rethink conventional product design and thus being able to produce more efficiently.

With fresh insights about the product, OECHSLER started the redesign process. Two options were evaluated: Either create an All-in-One product and eliminate all mounting steps. In this case, OECHSLER would have to reconstruct foams by lattice, reduce the design to one frame by full TPU print, as well as integrate rotatable parts into the TPU printed frame. Or reduce elements so just the foams would be replaced with a 3D-printed lattice.

The challenge

Lattice structured softening component as one single component

As a pioneer of new technologies and striving for innovation OECHSLER aimed to realize option one: The creation of an all-in-one product by eliminating all mounting steps. For this approach the team had to have a deep understanding of the standard goggles to enable a one-component printable solution: the lattice may not be too thin otherwise it could break easily and the kinematics would not be guaranteed. If it were too thick the comfort would be reduced. After dismounting all components, the development team scanned all parts via CT to gain deeper insights into the component dimensions. Afterwards the components have been reconstructed in a vector-based program to generate a suitable print file for the solid and lattice parts.

The solution

Production

Even though OECHSLER has lots of experience in creating new print files the first attempt is rarely right. The first prints were too stiff so that the handles were not flexible enough. Contrary to the initial assumption, this was not caused by the print file but by the post-processing steps in production. The lattice structure needed a different and more intense cleaning of the lattice structures to remove more of the printing residue. Even though optimizing the print file has been quite fast, the adjustment of the post-processing to increase the flexibility of the lattice structure was challenging.

Outcome

The additive manufacturing lattice technology enables a variety of comfort and design applications that have not been possible before. Additionally, the rapid development and production process enables a start-to-finish product timeline of around four weeks. The example of the additive manufactured skiing goggles shows the following advantages that can be applied to multiple products as well:

Increased wearing comfort and integrated damping function in case of an accidents
Combination of rigid and soft elements in one component
Movable joints instead of extra parts like clips
Reduction of material variety leading to easier recycling at the end of the product life cycle
Reduction of production costs due to the elimination of mounting steps
Foam replaced by 3D printed lattice structure: adjustable hardness – the existing multi-layer foams can be replaced

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