New centre in Sweden will apply 3D printing to speed up innovation.
GE Healthcare has opened the doors to a new Innovative Design and Advanced Manufacturing Technology Centre for Europe, in Uppsala, Sweden, it’s first 3D printing lab designed to speed up the launch of new products for the healthcare industry.
The centre brings together polymer and metal additive technology alongside traditional machining equipment and collaborative robots, known as “cobots”. At the centre, GE Healthcare’s Research and Design teams will work with advanced manufacturing engineers and customers to design, test and produce 3D printed parts for GE Healthcare products and prepare for manufacturing.
“We are exploring opportunities where additive can bring cost savings and technical improvements to our supply chain and products,” Andreas Marcstrom, Manager of Additive Engineering at GE Healthcare’s Uppsala site explained. “Simply printing a part doesn’t really deliver that much improvement to a product or process. You have to re-think the entire design – to do this, you need your R&D teams and your additive manufacturing engineers working from the start of the development process – our centre in Uppsala ensure that critical step.”
GE is currently working with biotechnology company Amgen to test the performance of a chromatography column, a device used in the complex process to develop biopharmaceuticals to treat diseases including cancer and immune diseases. The 3D printed column has been custom-designed and is now being tested to see if it can be used to help develop improved processes for the purification stage of biopharmaceutical production.
The GE Healthcare Advanced Manufacturing Engineering team has also developed and programmed multiple cobots which are now installed across GE Healthcare factories globally to improve efficiency in production lines and some will form part of GE Healthcare’s Brilliant Factories.
The new centre in Uppsala joins GE Healthcare’s other advanced manufacturing and engineering centre which is based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. GE seeks to grow its new additive business to $1 billion by 2020 following the acquisition of metal AM firms, Arcam and Concept Laser, last year and is planning to sell 10,000 AM machines over the next 10 years.
