The plan was first unveiled in a Xaar trading update last year when the company stated it would be upping its 3D spend in 2017 to around £1m of its £22m annual R&D budget. Managing director Doug Edwards said it had gone slightly over the £1m this year.
The centre was officially opened on 29 March. The 510sqm facility at Nottingham Science Park next to Nottingham University will be under the direction of the University of Sheffield's Professor Neil Hopkinson, the man credited with the invention of High Speed Sintering (HSS).
The event was attended by around 60 guests from a number of businesses, including ABB, BAE Systems and Jaguar Land Rover.
Edwards said: “We recruited professor Hopkinson and his team and their expertise is incredible. One of the things that is of interest to us is that HSS is many times faster than current inkjet printing 3D technologies, somewhere between 10 and 100 times faster.
“Our interest is to move 3D into volume manufacturing as opposed to just prototyping and we will work with our partners to build system solutions.”
HSS is a process which uses inkjet printheads and infrared heaters to manufacture products layer by layer from polymer powder materials at much higher speeds than other additive manufacturing processes.
Alongside Hopkinson, around six experts are operating in the centre, developing 3D printing equipment and services for OEM partners, materials suppliers and end-users. They will also be working in partnership with Denmark-based Blueprinter, acquired by Xaar last year, which comprises a team of experts in printing and thermal control.
Xaar also acquired US-based direct-to-product printing specialist Engineered Printing Solutions (EPS) last year.
Edwards added: “We have a significant business printing all sorts of products and now with EPS we felt this was a natural extension to go from printing on the product to printing the actual product.”
In its latest results, Xaar announced a sales increase but said that manufacturing issues had held back one of its key product launches. The Cambridge-headquartered group has set itself an ambitious growth target of achieving sales of £220m by 2020.
