Equispheres
The Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FEDDEV), Ontario’s Business Scale-up and Productivity Programme, are contributing a repayable $3.5 million to Equispheres Inc.
The Honourable Helena Jaczek, Minister responsible for FEDDEV and local Kanata-Carleton MP Jenna Sudds, formally announced the investment plan as part of the Canada Government’s commitment to innovation and climate change. It follows an $8m investment from the Canadian Government's Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC) foundation in January 2020.
Equispheres, a materials science engineering firm which specialises in metal powders for additive manufacturing in the automotive, aerospace, and defence industries, has been offered the money to help increase the production of its metal powder materials.
It is bringing online additional commercial reactors to help manufacture its patent-pending aluminium powders which are produced by an atomisation process that creates highly uniform, spherical particles with characteristics that are said to be well suited to the additive manufacturing process.
Kevin Nicholds, CEO at Equispheres said: “We are grateful for the Government of Canada’s strong leadership on climate action and programmes that support this kind of clean-tech innovation and this significant investment by FEDDEV will help support the next steps in our growth - working with partners in the automotive, aerospace and defence sectors to qualify our materials for industrial applications.
“Equispheres metal powders have unique properties that enable faster production of stronger, lighter and more reliable 3D printed parts and this contribution will allow us to scale up our production process and take advantage of an exponentially growing opportunity in the 3D printing space.”
Read more: Equispheres on bringing aluminium powder to binder jetting and adding value to 3D printing
The powders address the need for lighter weight parts while maintaining precision, repeatability and mass production speeds which is particularly beneficial for automotive and aerospace parts.
Nicholds added: “Equispheres aims to enable industrial 3D printing to compete with traditional manufacturing and our metal powder technology dramatically reduces the cost of 3D part production such that it is economically viable in volume manufacturing applications such as automotive.”
Equispheres has also strengthened its automotive expertise within its management team, appointing Thomas Bloor to lead its global business development and Rob Wildeboer - executive chairman of Tier One automotive supplier Martinrea International - being given a seat on the company’s board of directors.
Calvin Osborne also joined Equispheres last December as Chief Operating Officer to help guide the company’s scale-up and commercialisation plans and three new reactors are now expected to come online this year, adding production capacity to meet the surging market demand, and creating new jobs in the Ottawa region.
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