Siemens and HP partner to advance 3D printing

Venture aimed at product development and industrial production

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Siemens
HP began taking orders this month for its Jet Fusion 3D printers

Building on a longstanding partnership, HP and Siemens are accelerating 3D printing for industrial production through the creation of a new HP-certified Additive Manufacturing (AM) software module from Siemens. The new software module, Siemens NX AM for HP Multi Jet Fusion, is now available from Siemens PLM Software as an extension to Siemens’ end-to-end design-to-production solution for additive manufacturing. The NX software module will allow customers to develop and manage parts in a single software environment for their HP 3D printing projects, avoid costly and time-consuming data conversions and third-party tools, and improve their overall design-to-finished-part workflow efficiency.

Siemens and HP are also aligning future technology roadmaps to enable designers and engineers to completely re-imagine products to take advantage of HP’s 3D printing capabilities, escape the limitations of conventional manufacturing, and cost-effectively produce new products at faster speeds. This in turn will lead to greatly expanded opportunities for the industrial 3D printing of innovative designs.

Siemens’ new software module will enable NX customers to combine design, optimization, simulation, preparation of print jobs, and inspection processes for HP Multi Jet Fusion 3D printed parts in a managed environment. Users can now load multiple 3D part models into NX, and auto nest and submit them to an HP 3D printer, all in a single environment and with a minimum of steps. The NX and Multi Jet Fusion integration also eliminates the need for data conversion between software applications or process steps and, in the future, is intended to allow unprecedented control, including material characteristics down to the individual voxel-level. This will result in the ability to print parts with variable textures, density, strength and friction, as well as thermal, electrical, and conductivity characteristics.

“HP and Siemens are bringing together the best in design and manufacturing workflow software for the best in 3D printing, unleashing a wave of new product possibilities with the speed, quality and economics required for the modern digital industrial era,” said Michelle Bockman, global head of 3D Printing Commercial Expansion and Development, HP. “We look forward to collaborating with Siemens to continually raise the industry bar on what’s possible for customers with the voxel-level design capabilities of our Multi Jet Fusion 3D printing solutions.”

Siemens and HP share the objective of industrializing additive manufacturing. HP’s award-winning Multi Jet Fusion 3D printing solution is a production-ready commercial 3D printing system that delivers superior quality physical parts up to 10 times faster and at half the cost of current 3D printing systems. With Siemens’ comprehensive offering covering product lifecycle management (PLM) and electronic design automation (EDA) software, integrated automation and manufacturing operations management, combined with HP’s 3D printing solutions, manufacturers have the tools to establish additive manufacturing as a truly industrial production process. Both companies continue to work together and with other industry leaders to create an important ecosystem of partners who can help realize the goal of additive manufacturing as a viable production alternative.

2023 promises an interesting ride for print in India

Indian Printer and Publisher founded in 1979 is the oldest B2B trade publication in the multi-platform and multi-channel IPPGroup. While the print and packaging industries have been resilient in the past 33 months since the pandemic lockdown of 25 March 2020, the commercial printing and newspaper industries have yet to recover their pre-Covid trajectory.

The fragmented commercial printing industry faces substantial challenges as does the newspaper industry. While digital short-run printing and the signage industry seem to be recovering a bit faster, ultimately their growth will also be moderated by the progress of the overall economy. On the other hand book printing exports are doing well but they too face several supply-chain and logistics challenges.

The price of publication papers including newsprint has been high in the past year while availability is diminished by several mills shutting down their publication paper and newsprint machines in the past four years. Indian paper mills are also exporting many types of paper and have raised prices for Indian printers. To some extent, this has helped in the recovery of the digital printing industry with its on-demand short-run and low-wastage paradigm.

Ultimately digital print and other digital channels will help print grow in a country where we are still far behind in our paper and print consumption and where digital is a leapfrog technology that will only increase the demand for print in the foreseeable future. For instance, there is no alternative to a rise in textbook consumption but this segment will only reach normality in the next financial year beginning on 1 April 2023.

Thus while the new normal is a moving target and many commercial printers look to diversification, we believe that our target audiences may shift and change. Like them, we will also have to adapt with agility to keep up with their business and technical information needs.

Our 2023 media kit is ready, and it is the right time to take stock and reconnect with your potential markets and customers. Print is the glue for the growth of liberal education, new industry, and an emerging economy. We seek your participation in what promises to be an interesting ride.

– Naresh Khanna

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