Paderborn University has initiated a three-year research project aimed at producing electric motor components through additive manufacturing, with the goal of delivering production-ready e-motors that are lighter, more powerful, and cheaper to manufacture than those built through conventional processes. 

The project, named AddReMo – short for the use of additive manufacturing technologies to achieve resource-efficient process chains and engine components in the field of e-mobility – will have a total funding of around €11.5 million ($13.6m) and is being sponsored by Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWE) under its program for future-ready mobility. TÜV Rheinland’s research and innovation management team has been placed in charge of overseeing the initiative.

Paderborn University and Siemens AG are serving as co-leaders of the effort, and Mercedes-Benz AG has joined as a core industry collaborator, alongside Nikon SLM Solutions AG, Additive Drives, USU, and several other firms. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Leibniz Universität Hannover will reinforce the academic side of the project.

Three printing processes, one goal

The research team will be working with three distinct additive manufacturing techniques – laser beam melting, AddCasting, and binder jetting — to determine which methods best suit the production of high-performance electric motor parts. Each process offers different trade-offs in terms of material compatibility, geometric precision, and scalability.

“We are using three different processes to exploit design freedom and optimize the use of materials,” said Prof. Dr.-Ing. Balázs Magyar, Head of Design and Drive Technology at Paderborn University. “The focus is on further development in terms of process stability, processing new types of high-performance materials in the mono- and multi-material area, simulation-based design and AI-based quality assurance.”

Siemens and Mercedes-Benz have been tasked with developing e-motor demonstrators based on these techniques, evaluating them on technical and economic grounds, and integrating the resulting components into existing drive systems.

Supply chain resilience and broader applications

Beyond performance gains, the project has an explicit industrial resilience objective. Decentralized additive manufacturing reduces reliance on centralized supply chains, which is a vulnerability that has been exposed in recent years across the global automotive and industrial sectors.

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Mirko Schaper, Head of the Chair of Materials Science at Paderborn University and Dean of its Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, stated that the project is pursuing a dual evaluation framework. 

“The aim is to carry out both a technical and an economic-ecological evaluation of the processes and the e-motors in order to create a production-ready product,” he said.