Domin was recently featured in TCT Magazine, after Laura Griffiths interviewed CEO, Marcus Pont, about the journey into finding and utilising the best modern tools that can transform an industry.
A snippet of the article is here:
The ‘killer app’ is additive manufacturing’s holy grail. Find something that only 3D printing can do or do better, and you’ve cracked it. For Domin, a UK based manufacturer of high-performance hydraulic valves, that moment came from a series of fortunate events and a conviction that additive manufacturing, somehow, somewhere, could be used to change an industry.
“We thought that metal printing could be the vehicle with which we could solve some of the problems around us,” Marcus Pont, Domin CEO told TCT. “We didn’t quite know which problem to solve to begin with, but we thought that printing was going to do it, and that it would do it at scale.”
Pont recalls, though he’s not quite sure if it’s the truest memory, being handed a set of metal 3D printed parts from 3T Additive Manufacturing, and together with cofounder Andrew Collins, thinking “there’s something here.” That was over a decade ago, but it set them on a path, researching materials, design opportunities, economics and skills sets, which eventually took them to hydraulics, an industry, they believed, was ready for disruption.
“There were a lot of problems in the industry that were looking for solutions,” Pont said. “And we believed that those solutions could be brought by metal printing.”
The hydraulics sector, Pont details can be prone to waste and resistant to change, with technologies developed in the 1950s amid the boom of powered flight, still being relied upon decades later. But it’s also ripe for organic forms, the kind that promote efficient fluid flow, the kind that additive happens to be very good at producing.
“We found that the best way for us to disrupt this industry was not to look at the way things are done today, but to completely start from scratch,” Pont explained. “This isn’t just an opportunity for 3D printing, this is an opportunity to create the new stable technology and products within hydraulics and motion control.”
‘Liberating’ is the word Pont uses to describe the development process. There was no blueprint, no existing mold to fill, but with that liberation also came challenges; like, how far do you take the prescribed additive tagline of ‘anything is possible’?
“With great power comes great responsibility,” Pont explained. “For the first five or six years of the company, what we were really trying to do was reduce the definition of what was possible. So, the first thing we did was understand how strong the material was. That gave us a limit of what was possible from a material side. How much does it cost? That gave us a limit on, if we use a hundred grams of metal, we must add this much value. Those limits allowed us to invent new things, so you have this situation where, by applying more constraints, it gave us more freedom.”
Even within those self-imposed parameters, they tried lots of different ideas. But instead of diving head-on into the weird and wonderful, they started simple, choosing to experiment with tubes and arcs first over the complex lattices and elaborate structures that are typically the trademark of an additively manufactured part. Crucially, Pont believes, they treated AM like any other manufacturing process. The goal was simply to add value.
“It’s incredible how using the process in a simple way can add a lot of value,” Pont said. “There are some things you can make. And there are some things you can’t make. And if you can find the answer to a very simple equation, which is: ‘Does the part that I print add more value than it costs me to make it?’, you’ve got a production process, and that’s what we did.
You can read the full article on the TCT website here.
