Techniplas, a global designer and manufacturer of automotive products and services, has announced the opening of its additive manufacturing center in Ventura, California.
Operated by Techniplas Digital, the company’s digital-innovation and transformation unit, the new facility brings together the latest in generative design and lightweighting technology with advanced 3-D printing capabilities. The additive manufacturing center will deliver lighter and stronger parts, as well as cognitive assemblies, for the benefit of its global automotive clients.
“Everyone, from our customers to their customers, will directly benefit from the capabilities in our new facility,” said George Votis, founder and chairman, Techniplas. “The automotive industry is being disrupted and redefined at lightning speed, and we are putting in the capabilities which will place us well ahead of the curve to better serve our customers and to bring new engineered products to market even faster.”
The new facility is already equipped with a dozen 3-D printers, including DMLS, FDM and SLA printers that are used in support of the company’s digital transformation. Techniplas Digital plans to bring another 20 new high-speed 3-D printers online before the end of this year. As one of its first customer-centric initiatives, Techniplas Digital is using advanced additive-metal techniques to rapidly deploy hybrid tooling using 3-D-printed materials. Hybrid tooling is the combination of traditional tool and mold bases with modular plugin inserts that are 3-D printed for shorter production runs and greater manufacturing flexibility.
“We are moving quickly to eliminate many of the traditional constraints that most manufacturing companies face today,” said Avi Reichental, vice chairman of Techniplas and CEO of Techniplas Digital. “Our new facility brings together the latest in generative-design tools including metamaterials mesostructural-optimization capabilities and high-speed, UV-curable polymer 3-D printing. We plan to leverage our new additive manufacturing center to deliver cognitive connected products and services for a cleaner, lighter, more-personal world.”
In addition to speeding up Techniplas’ innovation cycles, the new additive manufacturing center is collaborating with early-stage companies to develop advanced algorithms that are designed to enhance its overall digital thread and manufacturing capabilities. That includes a new cloud-based generative design platform that compiles lightweight and metamaterial lattice structures automatically on demand based on size, weight, strength, style, materials, cost and any number of other requirements that can be specified by a designer or an engineer.
