Formnext 2022: Moving Towards a More Consolidated Additive Manufacturing Market

This is it, the long-awaited meeting place for additive manufacturing in Europe closed its doors last Friday evening. This new edition was full of successes, reaching new records and showing the return of the pre-COVID industry. This year, more than 800 exhibitors, thousands of visitors from all over the world and were innovations presented every day. In short, Formnext 2022 was a real breath of fresh air on a market that was in great need of being able to congregate and connect. And though most of the Asian countries were still missing, it is clear that the market has evolved and consolidated itself through numerous strategic partnerships and future collaborations. Let’s look back together at the outcome of this Formnext 2022!

What particularly impressed us this year in Frankfurt was the number of robotic arms presented on the exhibitors’ stands. Gaining in populairty, these solutions are notable as they are designed to give access to more impressive printing volumes with many different materials. CEAD, Caracol, MX3D, Fraunhofer, Weber Additive, VLM Robotics, Meltio and ALOtec Dresden were just a few of the exhibitors offering this type of machine at the show – a list that is obviously not exhaustive.

Multiple robotic arms were on display at Formnext (photo credits: 3Dnatives)

Robotic Arms on Display at Formnext 2022

Walking through the four halls of the show, it was impossible the numerous robotic arms extruding metals or polymers. These solutions were responsible most often for creating quite impressive parts, on XXL machines – for example through Italian manufacturers like Breton or CMS who presented solutions several meters long, attracting the curiosity of many visitors. It must be said that these machines often include different tool heads, which can be easily and quickly modified, thus expanding the range of possibilities in terms of manufacturing. While talking to the manufacturer CEAD, this was an observation that was shared – Emiel de Voogd, Robot Extruder Sales at CEAD explained to us, “And though this may be the case for many different 3D printing processes, robotic arms themselves have advantages. They are very flexible of course, you can change out the heads for 3D printing as well as processes like milling, but also lower cost. Robotic arms can be bought secondhand online for €6000 and then adapted with different heads for a user’s needs. And I expect that we will continue to see growth in robotic arms for these reasons. We are addressing key trends especially for continuous printing of small and medium series.”