ROSATOM’s Fuel Company TVEL has established a special purpose subsidiary “Rusatom – Additive Technologies” (RusAT, JSC). The new company as the industrial integrator will manage development of additive manufacturing technologies in ROSATOM.
The executive management of RusAT is commencing work in February, 2018. The company is to focus on four key areas, such as manufacturing of 3D-printers and their components, production of materials and metal powders for 3D-printing, software development for additive systems and services, rendering 3D-printing services and introduction of additive manufacturing technologies at industrial enterprises.
Equipment and consumables will be produced at Rosatom enterprises, mainly at the two facilities of TVEL Fuel Company in Novouralsk, the Urals region of Russia, NPO Tsentrotech and Ural Electrochemical Integrated Plant.
RusAT as the industrial integrator will coordinate product development and its further elaboration while ensuring the orders pipeline and contracts. The business target of the new company is to grow its annual revenue up to RUB 50 bln by 2025 (about USD 860 mln in current rates) taking over 1.5% share of the global market. Alexey Dub, First Deputy Director General of Science and Innovation, JSC (Rosatom’s science division), appointed Director General of RusAt.
“ROSATOM has developed a pre-production prototype of Gen II 3-D printer. Commercial production of the printer is scheduled for this year in Novouralsk. The Russian-made printer will be 20% cheaper than the foreign models and have a better performance. At the same time, if we consider just medical institutions in Russia, they need up to one hundred of endoprostheses each year, and we can produce them with our 3D-printers,” Alexey Dub stated.
Additive manufacturing technology has a number of advantages. First of all, this is a complex product form that is impossible to get by mechanical processing or casting, unique combination of materials (e.g., metal and ceramics), significant reduction of the item weight and prototype production time. At the same time, the application of 3D-printed devices ranges from nuclear and space technologies to medicine.