News and Insights of 3D Printing and Manufacturing
Bharat Fritz Werner India, the leading machine tool manufacturer in the sub-continent, is entering the metal additive manufacturing area. In order to lead its new AM activities, BFW India appointed Mr. Ashok H Varma as Executive Vice President and Global Leader – Additive Manufacturing – strategies, business & partnerships.
Swedish 3D printer manufacturer Wematter entered into a partnership with Italian distributor Bologna 3D to establish a sales and service network for the Gravity 3D printers in Italy. The partnership is a step toward Wematter’s internationalization, offering the European market increased access to the full range of Gravity 2022 3D printers.
SSI Sintered Specialties, a leading metallurgical solutions partner, has purchased the X1 160Pro and InnoventPro 3L metal binder jetting system from ExOne. The AM systems feature ExOne’s patented Triple Advanced Compaction Technology (ACT), developed to implement volume production.
When AM, especially metal AM, broke onto the global manufacturing scene and became understood as a technology that could be used to make final parts—not just prototypes—with fewer or no geometric restrictions, engineers around the world began to understand that they had to rethink the way they designed these parts. This concept became known as DfAM, an acronym for Design for Additive Manufacturing. As VELO3D becomes the first new entry in the metal powder bed fusion segment to truly scale, with revenues of nearly $100 million expected in the next fiscal year, and makes it to the NYSE (VLD) after the merger with billionaire Barry Sternlicht’s SPAC company JAWS Spitfire, CEO Benny Buller tells us that we need to move away from “obsolete and abused concepts such as DfAM and workflow automation if we want AM to really live up to its promise”. As disrupting manufacturing paradigms is exactly what AM has been doing since the start, this sounds like something we want to hear more about.
Brose, a global automotive supplier, is now confirmed as one of the first participants in the High-Speed Sintering (HSS) Early-Access Beta Program for the VX1000 HSS 3D printer. The company will work with voxeljet AG as a cooperation partner to further develop the VX1000 HSS for use in additive series production of polymer components for the automotive industry. With HSS, voxeljet combines the advantages of two existing additive technologies: selective laser sintering and binder jetting, giving the benefit of both SLS part properties and binder-jetting productivity. The new VX1000 HSS 3D printer has a significantly larger build volume and a faster print speed than previous systems, enabling true additive series production.
The time has come for Titans of CNC, a CNC shop-turned educational institution and TV series with a 300K-follower YouTube channel, to move on to 3D printing. The team is also moving on to a huge new facility with multiple industrial machines, from EDMs to the largest CNCs and it’s opening up the AM section by installing a Trumpf Truprint 2000 metal PBF system.
GE Additive has been working to offer an industrial Binder Jet production solution to delivers quality parts at cost, at scale. The company is reporting that product development is on track and that it will launch its solution in the second half of 2021. As Desktop Metal and ExOne have joined forces, that ball is now in GE Additive’s (and HP 3D Printing’s) court to show what they can do. In spite of COVID-19 travel restrictions, the upcoming Formnext may be the ideal venue for a showdown.
Steven Gonzalez and Alain Harrus have joined the Advisory Board of Roboze. Steven Gonzalez is one of the major experts in the space industry worldwide with more than 32 years of experience at NASA. Alain Harrus is an expert in industrial manufacturing processes, with a background in Physics and over 20 years of venture capital experience in Silicon Valley.
Accumold, a leading micro-molding company, has taken delivery of a Fabrica 2.0 micro 3D printer from Fabrica Group. The technology was previously known as the Tera 250 and was created by Nanofabrica which has now been acquired by Nano Dimension.
Industrial-scale 3D manufacturing is here to stay and revolutionize for good the digital transformation of the manufacturing industry. As the industry advances, it is necessary to attend to the needs of the customers, such as the ability to print with more than one type of material, the storage, and the management of the pieces that are produced. Thus, during the meeting on additive manufacturing held on October 1 at the Triditive facilities in Asturias, the new Amcell 8300 and Amcell 1400 industrial 3D printers were presented.