Aitiip Technology Center has purchased an S1 shot blasting machine from AM Solutions to automated its post-processing operations.
The company is said to maintain one of the largest development labs for additive manufacturing in Europe, catering for prototyping and individual finished parts.
Aitiip sought to acquire an S1 shot blasting system in response to its ‘rapidly increasing’ production volumes. By integrating the S1 machine, Aitiip is now able to achieve higher-quality surface finished at a more efficient cost. The parts processed with the S1 are said to be in full compliance with customer specifications and have helped Aitiip to achieve time savings of up to 90%. According to Aitiip, the average size of the parts it produces allows the company to print approximately 300 parts in each build with its HP Multi Jet Fusion platform, which would take up to 6 hours to depowder in a manual shot blasting cabinet. Now, the company is able to post-process parts in just 30 minutes.
“Before we installed the S1, all post-processing operations had to be performed manually,” said Pulao Murillo, Chief Development Officer at Aitiip Technology Center. “This caused not only exceptionally high labour costs but also limited our operational flexibility. Thanks to the automatic S1 system, we were able to significantly increase our production capacity. Now we can offer the parts contained in various assemblies for products already on the market as 3D printed components. With our manual post-processing operation, this was unthinkable.”
