3D printing is an extremely innovative field with the potential to revolutionize production—especially when it comes to additive manufacturing with specialty metals.
These days, anyone can print plastic parts at home using a 3D printer. And for some time now, additive manufacturing is also being used to print metal components. This technology is really turning traditional metal processing on its head: In contrast to manufacturing processes that remove material like milling and turning, additive manufacturing, as the name implies, adds it. Metal powder is applied layer by layer, and a laser then fuses the component into the desired geometry.
Adding rather than subtracting
In addition to supplying materials, design and optimized printing processes to our industrial partners, we also print for our clients, We can manufacture prototypes overnight that would previously have required months of work using tools and molds. Since we can, for example, print 50 different components in the same material in one print job, we’re also really fast. Plus, in contrast to manufacturing processes that use machining, printing does not generate any material waste, which saves valuable resources.
Saving Material
Building up instead of removing—it may sound trivial, but it's a fascinating shift in perspective. “Imagine that you want to manufacture a hollow sphere. The only way to do that with traditional methods would be to join two hemispheres. But with additive manufacturing we can print it as a single piece. This allows for totally different geometries.
