Industry Insight Panasonic
Advantage of using Hybrid Metal Additive Manufacturing for injection molds
The hybrid metal A.M. system is the technology developed in Japan for the purpose of applying it to injection molding dies. This system is the process that combines Powder Bed Fusion process and high-speed milling process, and can achieve machining accuracy and surface roughness equivalent to those machined by the machining center. Currently, this system is used not only for prototype molds but also for mass production molds. In this lecture, we will introduce three advantages of the mold created by this system, focusing on the application examples at Panasonic. The three advantages are; 1) Molds with complicated shapes can be manufactured with high accuracy and in a short period of time, 2) Conformal cooling can improve the productivity of the injection molding process, 3) Porous structure gas venting can reduce defects in the molding process.