TCT
On the latest Additive Insight episode, TCT Group Content Manager Sam Davies sits down with Neil Hopkinson.
Hopkinson is the lead inventor of the High Speed Sintering process which has been licensed by multiple OEMs, and evolved to become Selective Absorption Fusion (SAF) at Stratasys.
After inventing the technology at Loughborough University in the UK, Hopkinson worked on developing the High Speed Sintering process over a number of years before licensing the technology out. He later joined one of those companies, Xaar, who helped to move the technology closer to commercialisation through its Xaar 3D business. This business was then acquired by Stratasys in 2021, months after it had announced it would launch machines based on Hopkinson's technology under the new name of Selective Absorption Fusion.
During this conversation, Hopkinson details the early years of his R&D journey as he worked to commercialise the technology, the opportunity afforded by Stratasys' acquisition of Xaar 3D, and the application opportunities of SAF now the technology is on the market.
When discussing the technology's evolution from High Speed Sintering to Selective Absorption Fusion, Hopkinson explained: "At first, it's all about high throughput, high throughput, high throughput, but we were actually intentionally not going so high speed and doing high throughput because we knew that commercially your cost per part could be lower if you focused more on consistency and yield.
"So, we then looked at the naming of this and thought, well, actually we are not prioritising high speed here, we're actually prioritising consistency over high speed. And for perfectly good reasons. Ultimately to make the cost of the part as low as possible, and therefore find our place into high volume applications.
"So, it didn't seem appropriate to call it High Speed Sintering. High Speed Sintering was the name that I had been using myself since 2003, but you really are thinking it had evolved significantly beyond that and it didn't seem appropriate to use that term."
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