materials
WORDS: LAURA GRIFFITHS
Y
es, that’s right, tiss-en-krup,” Lilyana Stoyanova, Marketing Business Analyst at thyssenkrupp Materials UK confirms as we reconnect over Teams, three weeks after our first meeting at TCT 3Sixty where I’d almost definitely pronounced the materials specialist’s name incorrectly. A helpful video on thyssenkrupp’s website showing several mispronunciations proves I’m not alone and emphasises a clear mission that underscores my conversation with the team: thyssenkrupp wants the additive manufacturing (AM) industry to know its name. “In our particular fields, in aerospace metals, in automotive and motorsport metallics, the name thyssenkrupp carries a lot of weight, a lot of expertise and a lot of knowledge. People want to deal with us,” explains Nigel Evans, Head of Business Development at thyssenkrupp Materials UK. “We were really surprised at [TCT 3Sixty], a lot of people hadn’t heard of thyssenkrupp which has always been quite challenging for us and quite strange because we're not used to that.”
While at first glance, that might seem bullish, Evans makes a fair point. The thyssenkrupp Group is renowned for its steel production with over 200 years of industrial history behind it, serving countless sectors from mining and metals to aerospace and oil & gas, across its 480 worldwide locations. The Group is made up of largely independent industrial and technology businesses, one of which is materials distributor and service provider thyssenkrupp Materials UK, which recently unveiled its new offering to the metal AM market. “It's sort of an evolution for us into the additive manufacturing market,” Evans said. “We've been through the stages at the moment where we’re taking metal away from the components that we're making, the next stage is to actually create the component from the powdered metal and kind of grow the product.” For the wider thyssenkrupp Group, the move to additive began with the launch of its AM TechCenter in Mülheim in 2017.
“It's an evolution for us into the AM market.”
The centre was established to explore the technology’s potential and, as a materials supplier with its own raw materials department, it made sense take a closer look at the materials side too. The company has spent time carefully evaluating the right powders, chemical compositions, particle size distribution, flowability, limitations – the kinds of details those customers in the highly regulated industries that thyssenkrupp serves would be paying close attention to – and is now ready to provide to the market. There are many challenges within the metal AM process. Even the sourcing route for AM materials is entirely different to the traditional mode of selling materials. So different in fact, Evans, who has a wealth of experience across aerospace, defence and machining industries, jokes that for the first time in his 35-year career, he finds himself presented with a blank sheet of paper and conversing with universities, technology centres and machine vendors (some of which already use thyssenkrupp metals to
SHOWN: THYSSENKRUPP MATERIALS UK ANNOUNCED ITS NEW AM SERVICES AT TCT 3SIXTY
29.6 / www.tctmagazine.com / 015
