Materialise Partners With HP, Nikon And Essentium To Support Adoption Of 3D Printing

Materialise NV has partnered with HP Inc., Nikon Corporation and Essentium Inc. to bring improved productivity and connectivity to additive manufacturing operations. The partnerships aim to support the adoption of 3D printing by industrial manufacturers.

“To take advantage of large-scale 3D printing in an increasingly cost-competitive environment, manufacturing companies require increased productivity and efficiency and a seamless integration of 3D printing into their existing and proven production processes,” said Fried Vancraen, Founder and CEO of Materialise. He added that overcoming some of the remaining limitations attributed to 3D printing will require continued innovation and collaboration to create a more open market model with more control, more choice and ultimately lower cost.

Expanded collaboration with HP

Materialise has expanded its collaboration with HP, developing a new version of its build processor to support the full range of printers in the HP Multi Jet Fusion portfolio, including the Jet Fusion 5200 and Jet Fusion 500/300 Series of 3D printing solutions. This provides customers with a seamless connection between the Materialise Magics 3D Print Suite and HP Jet Fusion printing solutions, enabling advanced data preparation and operation management.

In addition, the Materialise HP Build Processor 2.0 allows users to retrieve operational data from the HP machines for better production monitoring. In combination with Materialise Streamics software, it allows users to store relevant build- data for improved traceability.

Strategic collaborations with Nikon and Essentium

In today’s cost-competitive environment, service-bureaus and industrial manufacturers increasingly rely on software and automation to increase productivity and efficiency in the 3D printing process, especially for metal 3D printing. Materialise is collaborating with Nikon to improve insight into the 3D printing build process. These research activities, supported by Materialise software and the Materialise Control Platform, aim to provide users more control and increase productivity through analysis of the building process.

Materialise and Essentium entered into a strategic partnership in November 2018 to jointly advance and scale industrial 3D printing. In a first step towards that goal, the companies have integrated Materialise’s Magics Essentials software with the Essentium High Speed Extrusion (HSE) 3D Printing Platform—creating an open and complete platform for industrial scale 3D manufacturing without the need to compromise accuracy or speed.

Streamics 8

Materialise will release a new version of Streamics 8, its 3D printing operations management software, this month.

The fully configurable web-portal allows remote design departments to better interact with the production floor for optimised designs and minimised production costs. The web-based API enables easier integration of the 3D printing production environment with existing business and manufacturing IT systems—representing an important step towards making 3D printing an integral part of the overall manufacturing process.

Streamics 8 also offers several advanced features to help increase productivity, including automatic nesting across multiple build platforms, for a more efficient build preparation. This allows users to simply drag and drop multiple parts into the build planner, which automatically nests the parts and creates the appropriate number of build operations. This automated nesting process can significantly reduce annual labour cost.

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