Industrial Automation Magazine India

Additive Manufacturing HP Partners Indo MIM for Mass Production

Published on : Friday 10-05-2024

Boost to ‘Make in India’ by locally produced complex metal parts for sectors like automobile, healthcare, and defense.

Indo-MIM, the world’s leading Metal Injection Moulding (MIM) company, recently installed two HP metal 3D printers – the advanced Metal Jet S1003D Printing Solution – at its Doddaballapur plant near Bengaluru in Karnataka. Of the two, one will focus on new material development, while the other will be driving application development and cater to customers in India, the Middle East, and the rest of the Asia-Pacific region. A third one has been installed at the Indo-MIM facility in Texas, USA. With this, Indo-MIM became the first company in India to set up a large-scale production facility for high-precision, 3D printed metal parts for automobile, aerospace, defense, consumer electronics, medical equipment and lifestyle segments.

This is more than a commercial deal – it is part of a global partnership between Indo-MIM and HP, both companies leveraging their core competencies to create top-quality, consistent metal parts for both Indian and the US markets. Indo-MIM started offering metal powders to the additive manufacturing industry in 2020 and is already a leading producer of world class metal powder products tailored for Laser-Bed Fusion and Binder-Jet 3D printing platforms. HP, on the other hand, offers metal jet printers ready for serial production of parts, making this an ideal partnership.

Commenting on the development, Savi Baveja, President of Personalization & 3D Printing, HP Inc, said “We are proud to partner with Indo-MIM to create new possibilities for their customers leveraging HP’s metals additive manufacturing capabilities. We are ready to transform the landscape of metal parts production in India by manufacturing locally and exporting worldwide. We are confident that by working together, we can drive innovation, boost adoption, and enhance India's presence in the global manufacturing arena.”

Krishna Chivukula Jr, CEO at Indo-MIM also expressed his excitement about the collaboration, noting, "Our partnership with HP signifies a milestone in our journey to provide cutting-edge production ready 3D metal binder jet solutions to our customers. The acquisition of HP's Metal Jet S100 printers equips us with the latest technology, enabling us to meet the growing demands of our customers with efficiency and precision, as well as expand the library of materials qualified on the HP printer platform."

Additive manufacturing – a revolutionary technology

Conventional or subtractive manufacturing processes manufacture or create parts by removing material from a block of metal, whereas additive manufacturing builds a part using a layer-by-layer process directly from a digital model, without the use of dies or moulds. Additive manufacturing or 3D printing is not new – it is a decades old process that was hitherto used mainly as a design and prototyping tool, but with rapid evolution in terms of materials and technology, has in recent years matured for series production, especially of complex components with intricate design. Besides, subtractive manufacturing needs a lot more material to create a part – a typical component weighing just 100 gm may need a 1 kg metal block to machine/mill/grind it into the final product. Additive manufacturing eliminates the weight by producing the same part with powders of the same weight – no wastage.

The celebrated example of the GE jet engine fuel nozzle for the LEAP engine is a case in point. This nozzle eliminated the need for 20 different parts welded together to form the final product – instead, additive manufacturing made it a single part, also lighter and stronger. In fact lightweighting is one of the significant advantages of additive printing, made possible with topology optimisation and availability of advanced materials.

“For us, as a powder-based company which both does metal injection moulding and actually manufactures the powders, the development of these systems which are production capable gives us the ability to unlock a lot of the design expertise that we've developed over the years. This allows us to build on that for our customers who are always increasing both the scope of what their part designs are trying to do; and it also gives us the ability to be able to meet those requirements and bring value to them in terms of not just the additive process and optimising the additive process or design, but in terms of material selection, material properties, because we're also making our own powders, material chemistry. So we're able to bring both of those together with these HP systems, which I think is going to unlock a lot of value in India for our customers,” explained Krishna Chivukula Jr., during the media interaction.

Sharing the HP perspective, Savi Baveja mentioned additive manufacturing as a disruptive new technology, and how adoption – enabling adoption – is very important. “To enable adoption, you have to be focused on use cases. So this conversation about applications is not a theoretical conversation. One of the reasons we love partnering with Indo-MIM is they are very deeply focused on applications.” 

Parts on display during the interaction ranged from a complex part for a fluidic system, a golf putter with latticed design, a 16-kg block of steel with complex fluid paths and cavities and an ornamental dragon – very much covering a wide range of applications. “Because of the complexity of the geometries, imagine the number of machine steps it would take to make something like this by traditional methods. This could be done right out of the HP metal 3D printer. Imagine making holes that size in a subtractive process out of a block, but not that hard to do with additive. So, industrial, automotive parts – gear holders, electrical filters, surgical guides, and putters with optimised design. The unique geometries and the creation of these lattice structures really optimise the moment of inertia,” said Savi Baveja.

A bright future

Globally today, additive manufacturing across all types is less than 1% of all manufacturing, according to Baveja. “We think it has the potential to be something closer to 10% of all manufacturing. Any requirement where the number of parts you need to produce is less than a few hundred or a thousand that can be done better with additives than with normal metal injection moulding or similar processes, which is about 10% of all parts. But then that's 10% of many trillions of dollars, so the potential is huge,” he says.

“This is essentially a leapfrog technology which, for the right applications, can condense your entire value chain of manufacturing into a single system, which is very radical in concept from a supply chain perspective, even aside from the ability to do incredibly complicated designs, right? And that ability to do that without using 15 different vendors and doing it in maybe weeks or days instead of months or years is going to provide a tremendous advantage to the industry,” adds Krishna Chivukula Jr. With Indo-MIM – the company that believes in simplifying complexity – in exploratory talks with defence and aerospace agencies, apart from its existing customer base, the future for this foray into additive manufacturing appears the right thing to do!

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