Plastometrex
Plastometrex CTO, Dr Jimmy Campbell, oversees the installation of Leonardo's first benchtop Indentation Plastometer.
Rapid testing and qualification are important elements for the maturation of additive manufacturing, according to Dr Jimmy Campbell.
The Plastometrex Chief Technology Officer alluded to the benefits of quicker part testing and qualification processes on the latest Additive Insight podcast.
Plastometrex is a UK-based company that is bringing to market a series of products powered by its Profilometry-based Indentation Plastometry (PIP) technology. PIP is a method for obtaining a material’s stress-strain curve from an ident profile by using accelerated inverse finite element analysis, providing users with an alternative to coupon testing and delivering results in minutes.
Having commercialised PIP, Plastometrex has developed relations with the likes of NASA, Leonardo, Morf3D and Babcock. And it is through working with these customers that Plastometrex has recognised a maturation of the additive manufacturing industry.
“If we go back to when we founded the company [in 2018], our view on additive was, ‘well, it hasn’t really exploded.’ We were very much in the academic sphere and the quality of product that’s being produced is too brittle for people to start considering using our type of tool,” Campbell said. “But what we’ve seen over the last four years is a real shift in that R&D to production landscape. Initially, a lot of our customers were academics or heavily focused on R&D using the tool in parameter development or alloy development, but we’re now starting to support serial production.”
What can take that serial production application of AM even further, Plastometrex feels, is an alternative process for part testing. Many manufacturers work with dog bone coupon testing to determine the quality of prints, but Campbell notes how this often means an additional machining step has to be carried out and that takes time. With PIP Testing, Plastometrex believes the ‘time-to-result’ is much quicker.
The company has been working recently with rms Company, a US-based supplier of medical devices, to support the testing of products before they are distributed to its medical device manufacturer clients. As the two organisations came together, Plastometrex identified how its PIP testing products can enhance its customer’s manufacturing processes.
“They have pull a lot of tensile bars for every single build that they create and the tensile bar might be a hundred millimetres tall but the medical device might only be 15 millimetres tall,” Campbell explained, “so you have to sacrifice a lot of time and cost, but you also have to think how relevant is that tensile bar if it’s 100mm tall relative to these small devices that are 15 or 20 mm tall? Are they assessing the same type of property? So, [we’re] working very closely with them to try and remove those barriers while still ensuring the product is safe to go out there.”
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