A cranial implant for a patient who suffered an accident. An exact and detailed reproduction of a heart to study in biology class and another on the scale of Michelangelo's David for art history. Toys, food, shoes, parts and chassis or fuselage for cars and planes. And a host of other applications. 3D printing is not coming to us again: in the 80s its first chords already sounded). Now it stands as a revolution for the industry.
In the first place, because it allows to produce faster than with traditional industrial processes. So much so that it is already capable of doing it on a large scale, something in which the HP company, which we have known for a long time for its printers and computers, is being a pioneer. "3D printing can multiply productivity tenfold, since it allows you to create objects additively, layer by layer, instead of a single, subtractive process, in which you have to remove what is left over from the printed object," he explains. Pablo Murciego, Parts Manufacturing Factory Manager of the company.
Secondly, with this printing technology, the steps necessary to create parts are shortened, the costs for manual work or the complexity of it are reduced, and it saves on materials, thanks to the use of powder, both polymers and metals. , for the manufacture of different objects or parts.
This, in a geopolitical and health context of scarcity in the supply chain like the current one, can come like rain in May. And it is especially useful in a country like Spain, where 99.83% of the business fabric is made up of SMEs that need flexible, fast and affordable systems. In addition, with 3D printing, you can touch with your fingers (and never better said), the dream chimera of customization in large-scale production.
Customized production, and this already exists, even to print a mold of our mouth and achieve a perfect alignment of the teeth, or correct defects in runners' footprints with custom-designed sports shoes. "With a digitized design we can now tell the machine: 'make me as many pieces with this engraved name and as many pieces with this other one,'" Murciego explains from a room full of huge and tireless printers, more than 20.
Being able to produce from a virtual model also makes it possible to obtain objects of a certain complexity, "like this wheel-shaped structure that also has several tubes incorporated, something unheard of in traditional manufacturing, where we would have first had to manufacture a part of the structure and then add the tubes. Or these pieces with countless half-millimeter holes. With 3D printing, the entire final finished object comes out”, illustrates Murciego.
What about sustainability in this whole process? What this technology does is replace ink with plastic (polymers, in technical language) and, as a novelty, now also with metal. This reduces the number of materials used in production by 50% and waste, because you use only the material you need by adding layer by layer, which promotes the circular economy. Plastic waste can also be reused, turned into printing powder and created into new products. And then there is the possibility for manufacturers to produce in-house, which reduces logistics and travel emissions, and to manufacture only on demand.
The company has recently installed its reference center for manufacturing parts with polymer materials using HP Multi Jet Fusion, in DFactory, the new industry 4.0 hub of the Consorci de la Zona Franca de Barcelona. Divided into three main areas and covering an area of 900 square meters, the factory operates as a complete production facility, both to produce its own parts from its own 20,000 patents, and to help its customers internalize and increase the production, for example, in response to a growth in demand or to reach new markets.
On the other hand, "having located ourselves in this network of companies that want to change traditional manufacturing worldwide is helping us to interact with them, see how they advance and generate new opportunities, take technology to another level, thanks to design solutions computing for automation or robotics”, says Miguel Armero, 3D Factory Production Lead at HP.
3D technology is being integrated into our daily lives by leaps and bounds and can no longer cease to amaze us. Does the reader have in mind the packaging in plastic trays that protect food or computers, when we buy them? One of the company's recent innovations has been to develop the necessary technology to design and 3D print the necessary tools with which to create cellulose paper molds for said uses, which are also customizable (for any company and sector). Both this set of tools and the molded cellulose molds produced in them are 100% recyclable, coming from bio-based materials.
“The next thing could be that every time we go to buy shoes or clothes in a store, they scan our body and we have that garment completely made in our image and likeness… in just a couple of days, at home,” Armero adds. “Since something is scanned and converted into a digital file, it can already be printed. The limit is the imagination".
