MD&M West 2023

MD&M West 2023

MD&M West 2023

From 7th to 9th February 2023, we attended the MD&M (Medical Design & Manufacturing) West, which was held at the Anaheim Convention Center, California in the USA. It was the first time for us to exhibit by ourselves as Micro MIM Europe GmbH. We were glad that our new company color, logo and etc were very well received.

There were other exhibitions such as Plastec, WestPack, ATX, D&M and the total number of exhibitors was 1,612 companies and as many as 14,342 total verified attendees were recorded, which is about a 30% increase from 2022. It was also interesting for us to see other innovative technologies for the medical devices manufacturing and other precision machine manufacturers.

We received many people who are both existing and new customers. A lot of the new customers who saw our micro-MIM component for the first time were surprised how small, complex and precise our components were!

If you did not attend the exhibition and would like to see our samples, you are welcome to contact us for an online or onsite meeting.

Carnival in Düsseldorf, Germany

Guten Tag! I am Naoki Nakata, working at the Düsseldorf office. I would like to introduce one of the most famous festivals in Germany called Karneval/Fastnacht (carnival) to you. The carnival reaches its high point on 20th February, known as “Rosenmontag” (Rose Monday). On this day, the main city streets are closed down for a large parade with fully decked-out floats. Thousands of people in fancy costumes walks through the city centre. The most interesting part was that candies and snacks were thrown out into the crowd from the floats as the sidewalks were filled with audience. I was also able to catch a small amount of snacks. The carnival greeting “Helau!” was heard everywhere in Düsseldorf. Since I couldn‘t dress up this year, I would like to prepare something to dress up next year.

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Conclusion

Cracking, slumping or blistering is commonly observed due to the binder swelling and/or residual stress difference between the surface and interior. It is possible to avoid these problems by selecting appropriate organic solvents and temperature control.

The catalytic deboning uses sublimation of binder, thus it is possible to decompose the binder in relatively short processing time with minimizing the deformation. However, with a strong acidic atmosphere, theapplicable metal material option is limited.

In the sintering process, the necking, which is bridging the metal powders by thermal diffusion, starts at the sintering temperature. Once the necking starts, the shrinking is observed and increases the density, thus before starting the necking reaction, all the organic components should be decomposed and gas between the powders should be removed. In the sintering process, the unwanted chemical reaction, such as oxidation or carbonization, leads to mechanical property loss, therefore a precise atmosphere control with low heating rate at the beginning of the process is required. Also, when it reaches the sintering temperature, some add it vegetal can be evaporated.

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