HANS LANGER X Two entrepreneurs with companies founded in Munich, Germany sit down to discuss the future of design and manufacturing.
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n the first episode of a new Additive Insight Podcast series called Innovators on Innovators, EOS founder Hans Langer [HL] joined Hyperganic CEO Lin Kayser [LK] to offer insights on the developments and challenges surrounding the additive manufacturing (AM) industry today. The below excerpt of the conversation touches on the pair’s beginnings in the 3D printing space, the development of a rocket engine application with EOS printing technology & Hyperganic’s software, and how they believe AM can emulate the development of the semiconductor space. LK: I think one of the challenges that additive still has, most people still have that image in their minds that this is great for prototypes, etc, but it's nothing for serial production. It's too expensive, it's too slow, the material quality is not there. And these days are long gone. This is what fascinated me. I've been doing software for 40 years now, and for me for the software was always one of the most creative things that you could do, software always moves fast, PC technology always moves fast. But the rest of the world cannot move very slowly. And I always ask myself, why is the rest of the world moving so slowly when I'm used to this incredible speed? The new PC is actually faster, and you can do more stuff and software just builds on top of each other, always improves. This seems not to be happening in the real world. And when I got a 3D printer in 2012, I realized this is a tool where we can bring the software paradigm into manufacturing. Then I say, ‘okay Lin, you're kidding yourself,’ because I had this FDM printer which produced horrible parts. Then I discovered this whole world of industrial 3D printing, and that's where my eyes opened, I said, ‘wait a second, this has the potential to be the manufacturing method that we can use to create revolutionary parts.’ And now we need a software ecosystem for that. That was kind of my thinking that eventually started the idea for Hyperganic.
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HL: I came out of the laser world, manufacturing with lasers. Parallel to EOS, we started SCANLAB, which is a world market leader today in laser-based digital manufacturing. This is far more than additive. Just to give you an idea, at EOS we use around 1,000 scan heads per year. But General Scanning is shipping 50,000 scan heads per year and companies like Foxconn, they use more than 10,000 of our systems just to manufacture iPhones. This gives you a little bit of perspective on where this thing could move. Foxconn still uses around 100,000 CNC machines. And when they got the order from Apple to manufacture the iPhone, they SHOWN: ROCKET ENGINE DESIGNED IN HYPERGANIC SOFTWARE
