Surface materials specialist and powder producer Oerlikon plans to expand its global additive manufacturing (AM) business with a R&D and production facility for AM advanced components in North Carolina, USA. This move is part of the company’s strategy to identify additional growth areas such as AM, where it expects demand to increase rapidly in the coming years.
Oerlikon will invest around CHF55million in this facility in 2017 and 2018, and expects to create over 100 new jobs at this site over the longer term. The new facility will offer US industrial customers a single source for a full suite of services for end-to-end advanced component manufacturing, including R&D, design, applications engineering and series production to post processing. While the site will be fully operational in 2018, Oerlikon will already begin its AM business activities from the beginning of 2017 at an interim facility.
This story is reprinted from material from Oerlikon, with editorial changes made by Materials Today. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of Elsevier.
