Australian additive manufacturing SME Titomic has acquired Netherlands based cold spray technology company Dycomet Europe.
The acquisition, announced on 1 December, provides Titomic with a base to reach into the aviation, automotive and higher education sectors in Europe. Dycomet has been offering low and medium pressure cold spray technology since 2006 and added high pressure cold spray capabilities to its portfolio in 2016. The Dutch company’s customers include Airbus, Mercedes, Rolls-Royce, Siemens and VW and Founder and Chief Executive Klaas Rozema will become General Manager of Titomic Europe.
“The acquisition of Dycomet is a significant step in Titomic’s strategy pathway to being a global company. We are excited to welcome Dycomet onboard and look forward to working with Klaas and his team on the many exciting opportunities that this acquisition presents,” said Titomic Chief Executive Herbert Koeck.
“While Titomic focuses on high-pressure applications, Dycomet services the soft-end low and medium pressure market. With our complementary machinery and product portfolio, the combined expertise now available to the company will further accelerate growth into new markets and provide current customers with a broader product offering.”
Melbourne-based Titomic currently has around 40 employees and has developed the Titomic Kinetic Fusion (TKF) method of additive manufacturing, which is able to rapidly manufacture parts up to 9m x 6m x 3m, representing what Koeck describes as a ‘step change’ in the industry.
The TKF process adds material at extremely high speeds, which then fuses on impact to form a component, rather than building up a component and then fusing it together with laser beam technology, and it also has the advantage of consuming less power in the manufacturing process.
“The powder can be any material, any metal, it works for aluminium, copper, titanium and invar. We have been focussing on high pressure additive manufacturing from the very beginning,” Koeck explained to ADM in November, only weeks after stepping into the role of Chief Executive.
Koeck sees significant potential for the TKF process in the defence sector, with the advantages of being able to work with traditionally difficult and expensive materials like titanium and invar. He added the emerging Australian space industry also stands to gain from the technology, in terms of its ability to add a millimetre-thin layer of tantalum to coat a space vehicle, thereby reducing the amount of radiation absorbed by over 95 per cent. The same technology would obviously offer similar benefits in the nuclear power (and submarine) industry. Koeck also sees the sovereign guided weapons industry as a beneficiary of TKF technology, but Titomic also has its eye on the end-to-end process.
“In the laser-beam particle fusion technology, you need ‘spherical powder’ in which all the particles are the same size and shape, because the powder needs to flow like a liquid. Spherical powder is also expensive, a kilogram costs around $200-250, but because size or shape doesn’t matter to the TKF process I get that powder for less than $100, which is a fundamental advantage from the commercial side,” Koeck explained.
“Australia sits on the highest reserves of titanium in the world, but it is currently shipped to countries like China, which converts it into powder and sells it back to Australia. We are looking into whether we can produce titanium powder here and, because Australian defence industry is engaged with American defence suppliers, instead of your raw material being dependent upon China or Russia, I'd rather to be able to say it comes from our own production here in Australia.”