The CERATIZIT Group wins the 2020 Innovation Award

The importance of additive manufacturing processes for plastic, steel, and other material components has been growing steadily over the last few years. However, when it comes to cemented carbide, there has never been an alternative to traditional methods, such as machining or casting, incomparable in terms of reliability and performance. Well, at least up to now. In fact, with its newly developed process, CERATIZIT can not only achieve the quality level the market is used to, but also adapt the manufacturing to the most strict requirements. The additive manufacturing of carbide parts is the ideal solution for low-quantity, high-complexity components. 

“The additive manufacturing of carbide products provides us with more flexibility in terms of implementing customer requirements and opens new design possibilities, which we can use to offer our customers highly optimized, individual solutions in minimum time”, claims Ralph Usendinger, CERATIZIT Head of R&D.

As additive manufacturing takes advantage of 3D printing and in-house geometry studies, it allows great time and cost savings in high-complexity prototypes development. Indeed, 3D printing makes project planning and implementing faster than ever, because it makes production-intensive tools (such as pressure dies or diamond cutters) redundant. The second significant advantage of this process is the freedom of design: new structures and geometries allow a higher degree of component complexity. 

This ground-breaking innovation could not pass unnoticed. In fact, the CERATIZIT Group has won the 2020 Innovation Award in the ‘Process’ category for its new process for the additive manufacturing of tungsten carbide-cobalt. Read more >> 

For over 100 years, CERATIZIT has been a pioneer in developing exceptional hard material solutions for machining and wear protection. The private company, with registered offices in Mamer, Luxembourg, develops and produces highly specialised cutting tools, indexable inserts, rods made from hard materials and wear parts.