HP’s Latest 3D Printers in HP Labs | Customers Views Customers visiting HP’s Customer Welcome Center (CWC) in Palo Alto can now also experience HP’s new state of the art 3D Customer Lab. Situated in HP Labs' base camp building adjoining the CWC, the Multi Jet Fusion 3D Customer Lab is where clients and accomplices can both see and experience HP's new 3D printers in real life. This is additionally a dynamic research office, says Lihua Zhao, executive of HP's Advanced Material and Process Research group.

"We opened in late July and have seen more than 200 clients, accomplices and organization together accomplices get through the lab," Zhao notes. "They see what our most recent HP Printer Support can do and furthermore witness HP look into in real life, as we run investigations to refine our 3D innovation and print things that assistance other HP Labs groups lead their examination."

The lab's star attractions are a couple of fresh out of the plastic new, modern review HP Jet Fusion 4200 printers, each with its own HP 4200 Processing

Station. Guests get the opportunity to figure out how print trolleys the measure of a local dishwasher are pre-stacked with powdered printing material before being opened into the primary printer body. The printer at that point goes layer by layer filling the trolley and making the parts.

3D-printed part After printing, the just-built items have to cool down, which can often take as long as the printing process. To avoid keeping the printer out of service for that time, the trolley is removed, placed into a Processing Station and another trolley is wheeled into place, so that production never stops. At the processing station, the printed items are cooled, unpacked, and cleaned of any excess powder, which is recycled for use in the next print run, a huge milestone in 3DP. In traditional 3D technology like SLS only 50% of the powder can be reused. With HP MJF you can reuse all the powder.

“What this means is that you can keep an HP 3D printer going all the time, which is important to our customers as they like using these printers to manufacture customized parts,” says Zhao. “We like to point out that up to 50% of the printer components in each HP 4200 printing system are themselves printed on an HP 3D printer.” Visitors range from manufacturers, who are already very familiar with 3D printing and want to see HP’s latest commercial offering, to customers that have yet to move into 3D printing but want a clear sense of the technology’s potential. In addition to learning about the print process, they get to see and handle final printed pieces and learn about the flexibility and economics of additive manufacturing. Some come with very specific questions or manufacturing needs in mind and the HP Labs engineers they meet can often point them to teams within HP’s business units that can help meet their needs or overcome their challenges. But these conversations also spark ideas for new research directions at HP Labs and potential new partnerships. “That’s an important aspect of having the 3D Customer Lab in HP Labs,” Zhao says. “We are continually improving our technology and we can run research trials through these printers to better understand many practical challenges that we identify in these conversations and then try out potential solutions to them.” In addition, the HP Labs 3D print research team is using the facility to test and refine many of its own ideas for 3D printing innovations – it can also draw on more advanced print test facilities that are the forerunners of future HP 3D printers – and to help other HP Labs groups conduct their research. Researchers designing new software and storage solutions for end-to-end design/print/manufacturing processes, for example, can test their ideas in the near-commercial conditions of the 3D facility. And one off prototypes

developed by teams in HP’s Immersive Experience Lab can now be easily printed on demand.

3D-printed part