At the end of the U2 line of Vienna’s subway, it is completely still. Just a few people are left to disembark a train that has travelled no more than 20 minutes from the city centre out to the Seestadt district.
Like me, they are now making the remainder of their journey on foot. There is zero traffic, and even less noise as Google Maps leads me to the second building of the Technologiezentrum campus across from the station. My fellow commuters continue down the street.
The Technologiezentrum campus will one day be made up of five buildings, though only two have been constructed so far. Incus has resided in this modern facility since the start of January 2020, having spent the first three months of its incorporated life in the cellar of a Lithoz facility.
Spinning out of Lithoz in September 2019, TCT first interviewed Incus at Formnext that autumn – a fact that is discussed over a quick coffee in the company’s canteen. Back then, the company had just introduced its Hammer Lab35 system for small-scale production and materials development, though it hinted at bigger things to come.
And they are coming - at this year's Formnext, Incus will debut its Hammer Pro40 system for 'mass manufacturing'.
Later on, CEO Gerald Mitteramskogler and I will cast our eyes on one specific development, which will be announced imminently and showcased at the 2023 edition of Formnext next month. It represents a significant step forward for a company that was confronted with the Covid-19 pandemic just months after incorporation and has otherwise gone about its business relatively quietly. Since spinning out of Lithoz, Incus has announced the ramping up of production of its Hammer Lab35 system and made public only a couple of its users, but make no mistake, it has been busy.
The series of sintered parts Mitteramskogler laid out on his office table at midday proves Incus has been hard at it. Most of the components displayed are strictly off-the-record, with R&D still ongoing with several existing and prospective customers. Among them are consumer product applications, medical tools, and surgical instruments, which exhibit Incus’ capacity to produce complex parts with smooth surface finishes. Mitteramskogler has been underlining this all morning.
To come in and out of his working space, you must first pass through a safety gate. Most days, Mitteramskogler shares his office with his mixed-breed dog. Recently, the dog has been working his way through a Mitre football, which is in shreds on the floor, but today he’s carrying out his duties from home. It leaves Gerald free to give TCT a thorough tour of the Incus facilities.
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We’re to start in the Incus R&D labs on the ground floor, walking and talking as Mitteramskogler notes the company has 26 members of staff and 14 different nationalities – soon to be 27 and 15 when a new recruit joins in November. En route, we pass through the showroom, stopping briefly at one of five Hammer Lab35 systems. On the build plate, a variety of components are being printed layer by layer with the aid of a lithography projector: Five tool heads printed in two different orientations alongside several smaller parts stacked on top of each other.
“The printing process, it's quite similar to what Lithoz is doing,” Mitteramskogler says. “So, we have a photopolymer-based binder system, photopolymerisation with the projector unit. In this case, the projector unit is sitting on the top, and Lithoz is doing polymerisation from the bottom. What's different to the Lithoz system is that our feedstock will be solid at room temperature. So, with a heated coating blade – it's about 40, 45 degrees Celsius – [we] melt the feedstock, [apply a] coating, and then we go [to] photopolymerisation on the top, another coating step, and then again photopolymerisation on the top. This is how this layer-by-layer process works.”
Through this process, metal powder is homogeneously dispersed in a light-sensitive resin and selectively polymerised by exposure with light. That metal powder is metal injection moulding grade material, with the biggest particles Incus is working with said to be around 8-10 microns. Ninety per cent of the market, Mitteramskogler suggests, is working with particles around 20 microns in size. Lithoz, however, is working with particle sizes at just under 200 nanometers, hence significant enhancements were required for the technology to process metals.
Incus GmbH
Inside Incus' production facility.
As we look at the back of a Hammer Lab35 system later on in the production facility, Mitteramskogler remembers the first incarnation of the Hammer Lab system being a ‘nasty prototype’. The machine was built from scrap materials leftover from Lithoz’s own production endeavours, and the configuration of the cables was a mess. In a ‘super humid’ underground facility, the temperature and humidity control were no way near ideal either.
Incus, then, has come a long way in a few short years. The whole building is ‘acclimatised to control temperature and humidity’, and you can see that in the quality of the parts that Incus can output. In the R&D facility, there is another table packed with pre-sintered green parts, but most of them already with pretty good surface finishes. Post-print, parts are typically de-caked, with the green parts undergoing a cleaning process (said to be more intensive for smaller, complex parts), and then through a debinding and sintering phase to achieve the final metallic properties. But before most of that, the parts are already smooth to touch.
They’re also quite difficult to break prior to sintering, something which helps Incus users move the parts through the workflow and protect their yield. Having been to a trade fair in the Middle East last week, Mitteramskogler was also reminded of how useful it is to not have to work with loose powder.
“In some environments, that’s not favoured,” he says. “We have all the powder bonded into our feedstock, so you cannot get it in the air or anything, can’t breathe it in. It makes it quite safe to operate as well. Changing from one material to another happens within less than five minutes, which is especially important for an R&D environment.”
Those working in the R&D facility next door will testify to that. As we wander in and walk around the table of parts being worked on, there are components manufactured in stainless steel 316L, stainless steel 17-4 PH, copper, and titanium 64, while Mitteramskogler tells me there is a tungsten project underway. In theory, though, any MIM powder should run through its printers, and anything that’s a challenge for MIM, will be a challenge for Incus too.
As Mitteramskogler explains this, we find ourselves standing next to a temperature furnace for decaking, which Incus has been providing for about a month now. This system works by blowing hot air onto the part to melt the surrounding material, all of which can be recycled for future use in an Incus printer. The material, Incus says, can be reused in its printing systems without adding any fresh material up to five times, but one of its customers is adding a 10% volume of fresh material into its feedstock just to be sure.
Incus GmbH
IFAM Component Award-winning micro-scale gripper device that provides surgeons with improved control and manoeuvrability during laparoscopic interventions. By using finer powders measuring less than 17µm in diameter (d90), Incus was able to reduce the resulting surface roughness (Ra) to below 2µm. The Hammer Lab35 3D printer allowed for a 15µm resolution in the X, Y, and Z directions, enabling the part's intricate detail.
Though the company has sought to develop a piece of equipment to decake printed components, it is deciding instead to strike up relationships with sintering furnace OEMs to provide its customer base with the required equipment to post-process parts. Many customers, of course, have sintering equipment installed in their facilities already, but there are some – including a well-known automotive brand – who have invested in Incus’ metal 3D printing technology with limited sintering experience. Incus, then, is working with these companies to educate staff on the prerequisites of metal photopolymerisation – namely, factoring in the inevitable shrinkage at the design stage by upscaling parts by 17-18%.
“The printing might be very easy. That’s just pushing the button to get the green part, but for the debinding and sintering operation, you need to know what you’re doing. If you can avoid a lot of problems during the part design phase, you might help yourself a lot during the final processes coming after the printer. It’s very important to have a design that’s good for the sintering operation [because] you might see deformations and homogenous defects that are dependent on the geometry, so it’s always good to have a part that has a very good, solid surface, a good foundation, so it can shrink.”
We are now back in Mitteramskogler’s office as he lays out the aforementioned selection of consumer product applications, medical tools, and surgical instruments. One component is said to be used in neurosurgery and another is a flexible steel tool for cervix procedures. There’s also a part being developed by Micro MIM in Japan; a small motor unit component with four nozzles enabling gas flow that was previously five separate components assembled together.
These intricate components are where Incus sees its niche.
“[It’s] our sweet spot with the technology,” Mitteramskogler says. “Complex pieces that cannot be done with binder jetting. We can do the same as binder jetting, but then we are in direct competition with them, and I think the perfect fit for the technology is where we are just unique.”
Incus GmbH
It’s not only right for the technology, but the business too. Currently, Incus feels sufficiently differentiated from everything else in the additive manufacturing market. It identifies binder jetting as the closest thing to competition, but even then, it expects to triumph when the smoothness and resolution of the parts are more important than the volume.
“People typically find us when they look for sinter-based methods and then find that the surface quality is not good enough [with binder jetting] and they need something better,” Mitteramskogler says after noting: “Having binder jetting as competition helps us because people know already what sinter-based technologies are and they are getting more and more popular because the big guys are putting a lot in marketing. The market is definitely moving.”
In time, Incus expects to help move it again. Having proved its ability to deliver parts in high resolution and excellent surface quality, the company is now set to place an emphasis on scale. It hopes to demonstrate that its lithography-based metal 3D printing technology can be used for production parts and is also working to secure distributors in key markets like the United States and China. From partners in the latter, Mitteramskogler has already seen a marketing brochure that will be taken to regional trade shows.
“It’s very impressive to see our Chinese brochure,” he finishes. “Let’s hope there’s more happening from this market in the future. Hopefully not any competitors coming up, but you never know. When you’re good, you’re going to get competition.”
