Announcements from HP and Materialise, PLUS democratization, standardization, and sustainability on the Industry Stage.
Welcome to Day 2 of my remote coverage of this year’s Formnext.
(It’s just like in-person coverage, but with fewer handshakes and more livestreams.)
Let’s dive in with two more big announcements from the show.
HP promotes materials, machines, and partnerships
The 2D and 3D printing behemoth, HP is pushing hard on additive manufacturing (AM) adoption with a host of announcements, including the new HP Additive Manufacturing Network Program, which is framed as “an inclusive, dynamic, data-driven framework.”
More tangible news includes the announcements that Continuum Powders and INDO-MIM have qualified OptiPowder Ni718 for use on the HP Metal Jet S100, with sintered components reportedly achieving >98% density. HP is also collaborating with GKN Powder Metallurgy on copper applications with more details to come.
On the machine side, the company is getting into material extrusion with the HP Industrial Filament 3D Printer 600 High Temperature (HP IF 600HT), a modular system designed for printing high-temperature and engineered filaments that will be available in the first half of next year. A larger system, the HP IF 1000XL will be introduced in the second half of 2026.
Automation, qualification, and workflow management from Materialise
Promoting AM automation and interoperability, Materialise has introduced three new CO-AM solutions, CO-AM Professional, CO-AM NPI, and CO-AM Enterprise, all powered by CO-AM Brix, which is described as a “new, low-code, node-based automation technology” along with the company’s cloud-based CO-AM Build Platform. The company says that its next generation build processors now feature a fully open, modular framework.
Here’s a rundown of the three new software tools:
- CO-AM Professional: Workflow automation and built-in traceability for high-mix, low-volume AM. Cloud-based and integrated with Magics, it’s intended to unify data and build/platform preparation.
- CO-AM NPI: Designed for NPI and qualification for series AM parts with CO-AM Brix toolpath optimization and build prep engineering. It locks validated recipes and QA parameters with the aim of speeding up certification and ensuring repeatable production.
- CO-AM Enterprise: Combines CO-AM Professional’s AM preparation with production execution and order management, connecting real-time shopfloor data and capturing input/output production and quality records.
“The AM industry needs an ecosystem that connects tools and automates workflows. No point solution will solve this challenge,” said Udo Eberlein, vice president of software at Materialise. “Platforms without deep domain knowledge risk becoming abstraction layers, convenient until they’re not, flexible until you need something they didn’t anticipate.”
From the Industry Stage
“Changing the manufacturing industry is, by definition, something that takes quite some time. The journey to full industrialization takes time, and it needs several companies to be speaking the same language because that creates trust for those that are new to additive.”
Felix Ewald, CEO & co-founder, DyeMansion
The second day of talks broadcast on the Formnext YouTube channel covered a few more of the AM industry’s favorite “-izations,” including personalization, industrialization, democratization, and sustainabilization sustainability. Artificial intelligence (AI) came up several times as well (because of course it did) but I’m going to leave that topic for later this week when I write about the start-up competition.
Instead, let’s focus on two of the panel discussions, the first of which was about AM industrialization, framed around the theme of risks and opportunities in democratizing 3D printing. What, exactly, ‘democratizing 3D printing’ means was a matter of some varied opinion, with some of the panelists interpreting it fairly liberally (no pun intended) as being about the proliferation and understanding of the technology.
“If you’re looking for people within your company, you will now find a lot of very enthusiastic guys,” said Stefanie Brickwede, managing director at Deutsche Bahn. “They have desktop printers at home, so they already know what additive manufacturing is about. A couple of years ago, we had to explain it to everybody.”
Others on the panel took a harder line. “It seems like every conversation about democratization is just about the price,” said Josef Průša, CEO and founder of Prusa Research. “But that’s not it. It’s about having control of your data: everything is transparent. You should have a diversity of suppliers, but the market is not there right now.”
Průša went on to argue that the Chinese Communist Party is “subsidizing” the AM industry. “They are trying to control the market” he said. “I would say that is completely against the idea of democratization.”
Although he didn’t explicitly disagree with Průša, Christian Seidel, strategic implementation consultant at Wohlers Associates and professor of manufacturing technologies at Munich University, emphasized the importance of “low-cost” 3D printers (which immediately calls various Chinese companies to mind). “These low-cost printers enable the whole industry,” he said, “because the next generation of engineers can think additive.”
Standardization and certification could be the solutions to this politically thorny issue, as Jan Lukas Waibel, head of 3D printing at the model and mold-making company Zech und Waibel Modellbau, suggested. “[Providing a 3D printing service] is a great opportunity, but we need certificates or regulations to prove the quality of our parts. We’re working for industries so we need to meet their standards.”
Brickwede agreed, emphasizing standardization as the key to AM industry growth. “It might not be considered sexy,” she said, “but if we do not all get more into standardization, we will never have this hockey stick of growth.”
Interestingly, the idea that standards and regulations can be an accelerator to progress rather than a barrier came up in the afternoon panel discussion on sustainability as well. “Standards can help a lot in terms of how to measure and evaluate recyclability or how to test recycled material,” said Ramona Fayazfar, adjunct research professor at Western University and founder and CEO of ReEarthMater. “Those regulations push sustainability; they’re accelerators, not barriers.”
Henning Schmidt, head of liaison office, Berlin at PlasticsEurope Deutschland, agreed. “We need regulations in order to have very clear frameworks that enable us to proceed with design optimization for material savings and reliability,” he said. “From our point of view, regulation is not bad, it’s necessary. We just need to be more precise with it than we have been so far.”
My takeaway from these discussions is this: If more and better standards and certifications are the key to democratic and sustainable AM, while at the same time ensuring that the democratization of 3D printing technology doesn’t result in a proliferation of inferior products by (and for) AM, then it’s no wonder that the road to industrialization seems to be so very, very long.
