HP and Hyperion Materials & Technologies have signed a preferred partner agreement to bring tungsten carbide parts printed on HP Metal Jet machines to industrial customers worldwide.
The deal builds on a new HP Metal Jet S100 that Hyperion installed this month at its production facility in Barcelona, Spain. Hyperion is a hard-materials specialist. It now offers commercial production on that printer, along with rapid prototyping. Together the two companies plan to cover the whole route from application development and qualification through serial production.
The work is split along each partner’s strengths. HP supplies its Metal Jet binder jetting platform. Hyperion handles the tungsten carbide itself, plus the sintering and finishing that turn a printed part into a finished component.
The material is CarbiForm, a new Hyperion line of ready-to-print tungsten carbide powders. Hyperion designed the powders specifically for binder jetting. CarbiForm has been tested with the Metal Jet printer when it is paired with Hyperion’s own sintering operations. So the tested process chain covers the powder, the printer and the furnace step, not just the machine.
“This preferred partner agreement allows us to combine our decades of hard-materials experience with HP’s highly scalable additive manufacturing platform,” said Biju Varghese, Chief Technology Officer at Hyperion. “The result is a new manufacturing option for customers looking to create complex, high-performance tungsten carbide components and bring them to production with confidence.”
Tungsten carbide, shortened to WC, is essential in demanding industrial environments. Printing it opens up designs that are difficult or uneconomical to make by conventional methods. These include complex geometries, application-specific features, consolidated components and customized parts. Printing can also shorten development cycles and make better use of the material. The partners say the printed parts keep the performance characteristics that make tungsten carbide valuable in the first place.
“Hyperion brings the depth of expertise needed to help scale WC additive manufacturing on HP Metal Jet printers,” said Arvind Rangarajan, Head of Product & Strategy at HP Additive Manufacturing. “Its knowledge across the tungsten carbide value chain, combined with HP’s technology, can help customers translate the design freedom of additive manufacturing into reliable, production-ready components.”
The next step is application work. HP and Hyperion will work jointly with customers to identify and qualify parts where printed tungsten carbide delivers real technical and economic advantages. For buyers, that means one production partner that runs the printer, the powder and the sintering.
HP will show the technology at Formnext in Frankfurt, Germany, in Hall 12.1 at Booth D41. The show runs through November 20. Hyperion representatives will be available throughout the show to answer questions and discuss prototyping.
