CERATIZIT Wins Innovation Award

The CERATIZIT Group has won the 2020 Innovation Award of the FEDIL business federation in the ‘Process’ category for the development of a new process for the additive manufacturing of tungsten carbide-cobalt.

The additive manufacturing of components made of plastic, steel and other materials has continued to grow in importance over the last few years. However, in the case of cemented carbide, there has not been a reliable process that achieved the same standard of quality as other manufacturing processes established and optimized over decades. However, with its newly developed process, CERATIZIT not only achieves quality of products manufactured by pressing and machining but can also respond better to customer requirements.

“Additive manufacturing of carbide products provides us with more flexibility in terms of implementing customer requirements and opens new design possibilities, which we can use to offer our customers highly optimised, individual solutions in minimum time,” said Dr. Ralph Useldinger, the company’s head of R&D. This includes active support in optimizing product design, he added.

Faster Delivery at Lower Costs

One of the main advantages of the additive manufacturing of cemented carbide is the time and cost savings during the critical ramp-up of products in small batches and of high complexity such as the manufacturing of prototypes. By producing the geometry directly from the design software, 3D printing allows for the fast planning and implementation of projects, without the use of production-intensive shapes and dies as well as expensive, diamond-tipped tools, which are needed for the machining of carbide parts. This saves valuable time and money, particularly in the development of prototypes.

More Freedom of Design

The second big benefit of additive manufacturing is the wider range of possible shapes due to the direct production of free-form contours which go beyond the limits of traditional manufacturing processes. Thanks to the new process, geometries can now be manufactured that were previously considered unfeasible. These include structures that have undercuts or areas inaccessible to cutting tools such as cavities and channels inside the finished body that cannot be accessed from outside at a later stage. CERATIZIT’s innovation enables a higher degree of component complexity as well as a deeper level of integration while simultaneously reducing the number of assemblies and individual components.

Potential customers interested in working together as development partners to find optimized solutions for their applications are encouraged to send an email to: [email protected].