Industrial manufacturing firm Siemens has opened its new Charlotte Advanced Technology Collaboration Hub (CATCH) to help customers accelerate their plans for the industrialization of additive manufacturing.
Spearheaded by Siemens Digital Industries, Siemens Technology, and Siemens Energy, the new research and development facility will be located in Charlotte, North Carolina. The hub will be used to partner with key OEMs, end-users, and US national laboratories to further industrialize 3D printing in the region.
“We are excited to launch this new additive manufacturing hub and to begin inviting customers in to collaborate and find ways to accelerate the industrialization of this technology,” said Tim Bell, Additive Manufacturing Business Manager at Siemens Digital Industries. “The benefits of additive manufacturing are clear from faster time-to-market, to better design through digital prototypes, to localized manufacturing helping to reduce supply chain constraints.
“We believe that the future of manufacturing is additive.”
Industrializing 3D printing
Siemens has long paved the way toward automation and digitalization within industrial manufacturing in a bid to help its customers achieve greater productivity and flexibility in their production processes. In 2020, the firm opened its Advance Manufacturing Transformation center (AMTC) in Singapore to help customers in the region adopt industrial 3D printing and Industry 4.0.
Siemens’ partnerships include integrating its automation technology into DyeMansion’s Powerfuse S vapor polishing system, and combining its software with Volkswagen’s processes to increase the productivity of the car manufacturer’s binder jet 3D printing process. Siemen’s automation software has also been incorporated into Nexa3D’s Quantum Laser Sintering (QLS) systems.
Most recently, Siemens and Roboze have teamed up to develop complete workflows for industrial 3D printing that will see the companies combine their respective expertise to increase production opportunities for firms in the energy, mobility, and aerospace sectors.
The CATCH center
Siemens’ latest partnerships with Roboze, ExOne, and Xerox will ensure that Siemens and its partners have access to some of the most advanced hardware on the market. Through the CATCH center, Siemens will work with OEMs, end-users, and US national laboratories to accelerate the industrialization of additive manufacturing throughout the country.
CATCH will form the entry point for manufacturers to better understand how and why 3D printing is crucial to not only designing their products more effectively, but also in moving manufacturing closer to the point of purchase and creating more resilient supply chains. Upon opening the new center, Siemens will look to empower its network of partners and customers to create and deploy 3D printing at scale across a variety of sectors.
The new center will house a group of world-class experts from several Siemens businesses and operating companies to support the firm’s customers along their industrialization journey. CATCH will become one of seven strategically placed hubs within “major AM ecosystems” around the world. Siemens Financial Services (SFS) has also supplied the CATCH lab with financing to lease several 3D printers for use in the facility.
“The CATCH center will not only help industrialize additive manufacturing, but also help incubate and grow the next generation of cutting-edge technology to solve industry’s hardest manufacturing problems,” said Dr Hallee Deutchman, Head of Research in Materials and Industrialized Manufacturing (US) at Siemens Technology.
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Featured image shows Siemens’ new CATCH center is now open. Image via Siemens.
