The depths of the ocean, expansive and still largely unknown, tend to turn up some alien-looking creatures. It seems only fitting then, that a recently founded joint innovation project (JIP) that’s taking unexplored design and manufacturing ideologies to a complex seafaring structure, should take a fairly alien form, too.
“We pretty much reinvented the bearing housing,” Artem Korotygin, principal solutions leader at 3D Systems tells TCT of a project geared towards the oil and gas sector. “You design following the function of the part, not some limitations artificially introduced by casting or other conventional methods. That’s really the value, that you can forget about constraints and just really focus on what’s important for the part.”
The part – or, more precisely, 25 parts – form a bearing housing structure, which is a part of vertical pump submerged in seawater. Now, as part of a DNV ProgrAM JIP3, which aims to standardise and optimise AM qualification processes in the energy and maritime sectors, under a collaboration between 3D Systems, NAMI (National Additive Manufacturing & Innovation Company), and Norwegian pump manufacturer Eureka Pumps, that structure has gone from 25 individually manufactured parts to one.
