Hand-out Würth Industry North America
Baker Hughes Wurth
Würth and Baker Hughes Announce Joint Service Offering to Expand Additive Manufacturing Solutions for Customers
Baker Hughes and Würth Industry North America (WINA) have announced a joint service offering that will expand their advanced design, digital inventory and customised 3D printing offering across a range of industrial sectors.
The industries targeted by this collaboration are the oil and gas, renewable power generation, maritime, automotive and aerospace industries. It will see Baker Hughes gain access to the fastener distribution company’s 80,000-strong customer base, in a partnership that aims to add scale and automation to supply chains around the world.
Baker Hughes’ additive manufacturing services, which are typically harnessed to source downhole and turbo-machinery components in heavy industry, will be offered by the Würth global sales team to help them produce parts on-demand and store part designs in the cloud rather than in physical inventory. Würth customers will also be able to benefit from a combination of machine learning algorithms, past maintenance records and production forecasts to identify suitable additive manufacturing applications.
These services are already being leveraged by several of organisations, including NASA who is having a design adapted and printed using a hybrid of Direct Energy Deposition and machining to produce a part that will be used in wind tunnel testing.
Baker Hughes has been using additive manufacturing technology since 2013, to produce components for the oil and gas, energy and power generation industries in low volumes. Today, it has seven additive manufacturing centres of excellence and has qualified 450 part designs, which have been additively manufactured more than 25,000 times. Through its partnership with Würth, both companies expect many more manufacturers to leverage the capabilities of Baker Hughes' 3D printing capacity.
“The collaboration with Baker Hughes broadens our offering in 3D printing and beyond,” commented Dan Hill, CEO at WINA. “Our existing inventory programmes gain a level of automation with no infrastructure change and we can take our customers’ ideas from prototype to small batch production to mass production at accelerated rates.”
“Now more than ever, industrial companies are looking for innovative manufacturing solutions to reduce lead times and eliminate physical inventories, while reducing the carbon footprint of operations, and we believe additive manufacturing plays an important role,” offered Scott Parent, CTO for Digital Solutions at Baker Hughes. “By combining our advanced design and additive manufacturing capabilities with Würth’s global customers base, we can expand the scope and scale of our services outside of oil and gas. We are excited to take advantage of this opportunity and transform the future of work.”
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