Mott Corporation acquires open architecture Renishaw RenAM 500S Flex machine
August 27, 2024
Mott Corporation, headquartered in Farmington, Connecticut, USA, has acquired a further metal Additive Manufacturing machine from Renishaw, based in Wotton-Under-Edge, Gloucestershire, UK. The new RenAM 500S Flex machine has reportedly enabled Mott Corporation to reduce machine turnaround and setup times, compared to previous AM technologies, while giving more confidence in the performance of additively manufactured parts.
Mott Corporation specialises in solving filtration and flow control engineering challenges in integrated components, point-of-use sub-assemblies, and integrated subsystems. It offers an extensive material selection for the most critical operating conditions, such as highly controlled bioreactor environments, semiconductors, chemical processing and refinement, and aerospace applications.
Historically, Mott Corporation produced components using three compaction methods: axial, isostatic, and rolling. However, these techniques are unable to produce some geometries. To expand its capabilities, Mott decided to investigate AM, identifying Laser Beam Powder Bed Fusion (PBF-LB) as the best technique for its needs.
Mott Corporation’s most important consideration when choosing a machine was said to its open architecture, which enabled the parameter editing essential to research and development work. The organisation, therefore, originally approached Renishaw to purchase a RenAM 400 system.
For added control, the company then upgraded its system to the new RenAM 500S Flex machine. This machine uses the same gas flow system, safety, and precision digital optics as the rest of Renishaw’s RenAM 500 series of Additive Manufacturing machines, but offers additional flexibility with the ability to swap the metal powder feedstock in a short amount of time. It is available with either single (S) or quad (Q) laser configuration, and the laser(s) can be used in either modulated or continuous wave regimes, adding an additional level of customisation. Incorporating the RenAM 500S Flex reduced machine turnaround and setup times for Mott by over 50% compared to the older machine. It has also improved the standard deviation of performance metrics by approximately 30% in certain cases, giving Mott more confidence in the performance of parts manufactured on the system.
“Renishaw’s philosophy is that process parameters should be as customisable as possible,” said John Laureto, AM Business Manager at Renishaw Inc. “Using the RenAM 500S Flex, Mott Corporation was able to optimise its processes for specific applications and can tweak the parameters as needed for novel projects.”
“Our ethos is to combine our design, filtration, and flow control expertise with cutting-edge technology to create highly engineered products,” explained Vincent Palumbo, Technical Program Manager at Mott Corporation. “That’s exactly what we’re doing here. The new machine gives us greater confidence in the reliability and performance of our parts, while speeding up development cycles, and better enabling us to bring our designs to life.”
Palumbo concluded, “The Flex has been the most popular stop on our facility tours. It’s great to see customers’ reactions to the parts we have been able to create. It has also generated useful dialogue between us and our customers to come up with development projects and think of other components we can design with them in the future.”
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