Philip Smart | Adelaide

For Melbourne additive manufacturing company Titomic Limited, winning last week’s Best Maritime Innovation Award at the Pacific 2017 maritime exposition in Sydney was another validation that its Kinetic Fusion titanium spraying system has potential across a range of markets.

Titomic has exclusive rights to commercialise the CSIRO-developed Kinetic Fusion, an additive manufacturing system that sprays up to 45 kilograms of titanium or titanium alloy particles per hour across a scaffold to produce a load-bearing structure.

The system overcomes limitations of earlier additive systems, enabling manufacture of complex parts without shape or size constraints

By building up a component instead of milling down from a titanium billet, the system can reduce the amount of material used from “buy to fly” by more than 80 per cent and cut production time from days to hours.

A Titomic aerospace industry application would see a component produced and built up in 2.5 hours with 25 kilograms of sharp powder and 10 per cent material wastage, compared with a traditional billet milling system starting with a 225 kilogram billet, with 90 per cent wastage to produce a machined part in 44.5 hours.

Titomic believes the system overcomes limitations of earlier additive systems, enabling manufacture of complex parts without shape or size constraints. Multiple robots can be used to build larger components, with the system also allowing joining of dissimilar metals, stronger structures and reduced time to market with no tooling.

The company sees potential in a myriad of markets from sporting goods to medical, automotive, building and low-volume high-value aerospace and defence manufacturing, and is building a 40.5 cubic-metre additive manufacturing machine, one of the largest in the world, at its Melbourne site for development and prototyping.

“We are all delighted to have won ‘Best Maritime Innovation’ award at Pacific 2017,” Titomic CTO and CEO Jeff Lang said. “It’s exciting to see the high level of interest in Titomic’s Kinetic Fusion technology from multiple industries. This increases our potential revenue target markets for Titomic to expand into as we seek to deliver the maximum value for our investors.”

Titomic’s business model will see clients offered a licence to manufacture with the technology, with access to prototyping services, consumables and support.