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Slowly but surely: Industrialising metal Additive Manufacturing the Norwegian way While the Norwegian market for Additive Manufacturing has long revolved around prototyping and polymer materials, metal Additive Manufacturing has seen rapid development in recent years. This is in large part thanks to the opportunities that the country's oil and gas industry is now seeing in the technology. In this article, Joppe N Christensen considers why it has taken so long to get started with metal AM in Norway and introduces companies and individuals who are now leading the way.
After oil was discovered on the Norwegian continental shelf in December 1969, much of the country’s industry has centred around oil and gas; this sector is more than seven times the size of all other industries combined. This is the first and foremost thing that has to be taken into consideration when looking at the development of metal Additive Manufacturing in the country. As in many other regions, the earliest activities around metal AM were led by academia and research institutions. In Norway, this was towards the end of the 1990s, when the SINTEF, based in Trondheim and one of Europe's largest independent research organisations, started conducting research into metal Additive Manufacturing. Since then, the academic community in Norway has done a good deal of AM research, and the Research Council of Norway has supported nearly 300 AM projects since 2004 [1]. SINTEF and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, now have a joint AM lab where they actively work on
Vol. 9 No. 3 © 2023 Inovar Communications Ltd
industry-based projects together. The University of Agder, the Mechatronics Innovation Lab (MIL), and the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) also focus on metal AM. The latter has produced a report on the current use of the technology, research fronts, and market forecasts up to 2045 [2].
So, if there is a lot of activity in academia, why have manufacturing companies in the country waited until now to embrace metal AM? If we are to find the reason, we must look at the composition of Norwegian industrial companies and what they produce. Here we see many small businesses, 90% of all businesses
Fig. 1 After oil was discovered on the Norwegian continental shelf in December 1969, much of the country’s industry has centred around oil and gas, a sector that has played a defining role in the growth of metal AM in the country. This image shows the NorSea Polarbase in Hammerfest, now a hub for AM technology (Courtesy NorSea Polarbase)
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