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Hiperbaric applies HIP technology to revolutionize 3D production

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Autor: Redaktion

Datum: 16. Nov. 2022

HIP is a technology that is set to revolutionize the 3D printing market, which is in full expansion and according to several studies will grow by around 17% per year until 2025. In 2021, this industry grew 19.5%.

“By applying HIP to metal parts manufactured with 3D printing we manage to eliminate any possible defects in parts destined for very demanding sectors such as space or prosthetics,” explains Rubén García, HIP Project Manager at HIPERBARIC.

HIP technology subjects components to 2,000 bar of pressure and 1,400°C of temperature to improve their mechanical properties such as fatigue life, resilience or ductility. If the high-performance parts are also made by additive manufacturing or 3D printing, Hot Isostatic Pressing (HIP) brings great benefits by eliminating the porosity of high-performance components intended, above all, for the healthcare and aerospace industries.

HIP technology with enormous potential

In Spain, the company Hiperbaric from Burgos is the only Spanish company that manufactures HIP equipment. Hiperbaric designs, manufactures and markets high-pressure industrial technology and equipment. From 2024 to 2027, Hiperbaric aims to place 3 to 5 HIP units per year on the market, which would represent more than 6% of the company’s sales. This figure will exceed €10 million in annual sales from 2027 onwards.

“HIP has enormous potential as an advanced manufacturing technology,” says Iñigo Iturriza, director of Materials and Additive Manufacturing at CEIT, one of the pioneering entities in Spain in the use of this technology thanks to its innovations in 3D printing materials.

Hiperbaric opened in Burgos in 2021 the first HIP Innovation Center that exists in southern Europe, where several researchers test new material developments using HIP and work on the opportunities that this technology brings to additive manufacturing.

“Because we are so involved in the world of HIP and additive manufacturing, we have become a user of 3D printing to make our HIP equipment,” says García, who goes on to explain the advantages it brings them. “In the HIP machine we are building now, we have been able to design an additive manufacturing heat exchanger that cools the contents of the load very quickly,” he says.

Elimination of defects and lighter designs

In addition to improving mechanical properties, HIP increases fatigue strength and results in fine-grained microstructure parts with good mechanical properties. This technology eliminates porosity and other internal defects, gives greater consistency to high-performance materials, enables the recovery of defective parts and makes lighter and lighter weight designs possible.

In addition, it has a valuable sustainable component because it reduces material consumption and costs associated with quality control by implementing statistical control by non-destructive testing (NDT), reducing the number of units that need to be tested.

“Nowadays all aeronautical companies are making efforts to reduce weight in airplanes because this reduces the tons of CO2 they emit into the atmosphere,” adds García.

As he explains, with 3D printing the sector now has ‘absolute freedom of geometric design’, which makes it possible to design parts that were previously impossible, such as skeletal geometries, with new functionalities or hollow inside.

3D printing reduces waste

“3D printing allows you to optimize parts in such a way that with 60% of the weight they give you the same function. In addition, it also reduces waste because you only use the precise material to manufacture the part,” García explains. Hiperbaric’s HIP Project Manager recalls that the aeronautical sector is very guarantee-oriented and HIP is a life insurance for them because “if they could not inspect the parts, perhaps they would not be encouraged to use them because it is difficult to guarantee that they will not have defects”.

In this sense, Hiperbaric has an Industrial R&D Collaboration Alliance with Aenium, an engineering company specialized in Additive Manufacturing technologies and complex material sciences, with whom it is using HIP technology to post-process high value-added complex metals and alloys and new materials for the aeronautical sector.

Among the most widely used materials in the aeronautics industry are Nickel-based superalloys such as Inconel (IN718/IN625), low weight Titanium alloys (Ti64, TiAl) or copper-chromium-niobium alloy developed by NASA: GRCop-42.

Start in the nuclear power industry

HIP technology began to be developed in the 1950s in the U.S. nuclear power industry for joining similar materials that could not be welded because they had different properties, but were joined by hot-pressed diffusion bonding. Since then, applications have been developed for manufacturing processes such as casting or powder metallurgy, among others, all the way to 3D manufacturing.

“We believe that in additive manufacturing any part that is going to be subjected to a lot of stress from a mechanical point of view will have HIP associated with it,” adds García.

HIP is a technology widely used in the automotive sector, especially in sports cars and Formula 1 teams, and it still has a long way to go for technical ceramic parts for satellites, ceramic bearing balls for the aeronautical sector and for electric cars, lenses for telescopes or parts for satellites.

“In space, there are very strong thermal variations, and the ceramic parts can withstand them very well,” says García.

HIP, state-of-the-art technology for the medical-prosthetic sector

The world market for medical implants has experienced significant growth over the last few decades and is expected to continue to increase in the coming years. Moreover, this market is set to undergo a major revolution due to the customization possibilities enabled by new technologies such as additive manufacturing. Implants will adapt perfectly to the anatomy of each patient, increasing the success of surgeries and reducing the need for rehabilitation.

The medical implant sector benefits fully from the design freedom offered by additive manufacturing thanks to HIP. This is the case of Optimus 3D, an engineering company specializing in additive manufacturing technologies, which uses Hiperbaric’s HIP technology, as it improves fatigue life by eliminating internal

defects and pores that could lead to the appearance and propagation of cracks that would eventually cause the implant to break. In some cases they have managed to extend the life of the implant up to 33 times. The manufacture of hip implants, knee implants, or dental implants are among the classic applications of HIP for this sector.

Another classic application is found in ‘blowing’ ceramic parts for industrial applications, as performed by Nanoker, a manufacturer of advanced technical and nanocomposite ceramic products and solutions for various high-end applications, which also uses HIP technology.

Hiperbaric’s R&D applied to HIP technology

Hiperbaric’s extensive know-how developed over the past 20 years has enabled the company to design and develop Hot Isostatic Pressing (HIP) technology in the framework of different research projects.

One of these is the SmartMat project for research into new technologies for the production of advanced materials, which had a budget of 2.09 million euros. Another of the research is XtremHIP, for the design of high-performance HIP equipment, with operation based on disruptive technologies, focused on the most demanding applications in the field of additive manufacturing, advanced materials and new applications, which reached 1.2 million euros.

Both projects have been financed by the Institute for Business Competitiveness (ICE), of the Castilla y León Regional Government, and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) – A way of doing Europe.