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Additive Manufacturing at HP
Additive Manufacturing at HP: A new ‘centre of excellence’ supports the move to volume production On June 12th, HP Inc. formally opened its new 3D Printing and Digital Manufacturing Center of Excellence at its campus in Barcelona, Spain. Metal AM magazine’s Emily-Jo Hopson attended the event and here reports on the 14,000 m2 facility’s opening and the company’s rapid rise in the world of Additive Manufacturing. She reveals how, whilst the company is not traditionally associated with equipment for industrial manufacturing, many of its core technologies directly lend themselves to a new generation of metal Binder Jetting systems.
From June 11–13, 2019, HP Inc. welcomed members of the global press and analysts to the opening of its new 3D Printing and Digital Manufacturing Center of Excellence at its campus in Barcelona, Spain. Serving as a global hub for HP’s Additive Manufacturing and Large Format Printing businesses, the Barcelona campus employs some 2300 staff, among them more than 700 research and development engineers, and supports twelve of HP’s diverse businesses across ten buildings. On average, the campus’s R&D staff are credited with filing more than one hundred patents per year. The new 3D Printing and Digital Manufacturing Center of Excellence comprises what HP’s campus staff call ‘Building 10’, and is solely dedicated to R&D activities in Additive Manufacturing, supporting both HP’s well-established polymer AM Multi Jet Fusion business and the development of its new Metal Jet technology and applications. Housing roughly one-hundred Additive Manufacturing
Vol. 5 No. 2 © 2019 Inovar Communications Ltd
machines, the opening of the centre coincided with HP’s 80th anniversary year since its founding by two friends in Palo Alto, California, USA, and marks a strong commitment to the future of the company’s business in digital manufacturing technologies.
Spanning 14,000 m2, the centre marks not only HP’s investment in the development of its business, but also shows a considerable commitment to sustainability, producing more than 110 kW of photovoltaic power through a large canopy of solar cells,
Fig. 1 Exterior view of HP’s 3D Printing and Digital Manufacturing Center of Excellence in Barcelona, Spain (Courtesy HP)
Metal Additive Manufacturing | Summer 2019
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