The votes are in and the winners of the 2022 LEAP Awards (Leadership in Engineering Achievement Program) were announced in a digital ceremony with products across multiple categories, including Additive Manufacturing.

Critical to LEAP’s success is the involvement of the engineering community. No one at WTWH Media selected the winners. Instead, the editorial team assembled a top-notch independent judging panel, comprised of a cross-section of OEM design engineers and academics — 14 professionals in total. This judging team was solely responsible for the final results. They are: Plamen Doynov, Geoffrey T. Haigh, Rance Herren, Sam John, Medhat Khalil, Robert Kollman, Andy Larson, Amar Maniar, Thomas Manley, Tatiana Minav, Jody Muelaner, Tom Solon, Michael Traskos, and Daniel Zammit.

In the category of Additive manufacturing, the winner of the Bronze award is Stratasys for its H350 3D Printer.

 

Additive manufacturing has seen growth in demand for products with pandemic-proof supply chains, shorter design-to-part cycles and reduced spare-part inventory. The Selective Absorption Fusion (SAF) powered Stratasys H350 3D printer offers customers control to deliver the consistency, accuracy and competitive cost for a range of markets. A powder-bed fusion system, the H350 provides several control features designed to ensure the system is production-ready for companies ready to embrace additive manufacturing at scale. All build data is logged for process traceability and remains fully under the customer’s control. Materials can be controlled, tracked and traced, and print-settings can be finetuned for each customer’s needs.

 

The winner of the Silver award is Arris Composites for its additive molding technology, an example of which is the metal bracket often used in aviation. Using its technology, Airbus was able to reduce the weight of a traditional metal made bracket from 220g to an additive molded version weighing 59g, for a 75% weight reduction. Additive molding is a hybrid of additive manufacturing and molding. It works with continuous fiber thermoplastics. You can find out more about additive molding here.

 

The winner of the Gold award is HP.
3D printing/additive manufacturing is driving a shift in personalized healthcare solutions, enabling society to move away from a “one-size-fits-all” approach to treatment and care. One example is orthotics. Orthotic designs sent to a centralized printer (versus purchasing one for each clinic) help clinics realize the benefits of 3D printed insoles without the burden of printer ownership and maintenance, extending patient care and broader industry knowledge to even more people. Additionally, advanced 3D printers also reduce waste in the production cycle, optimizing the use of materials at every turn and creating a more sustainable process overall.

By digitizing the process of designing, fitting, and manufacturing, HP has reduced the time it takes to make and deliver custom orthoses. Podiatrists and orthotics can also realize cost benefits through productivity gains, enabling practitioners to meet with a patient and start their insole process in the same visit, typically with a flat rate of the cost. With traditional molding methods, the cost would vary and was not known until the mold was with the manufacturing facility, oftentimes costing podiatrists if patients chose to not move forward. Arize is the foundation for a responsive and efficient practice providing the next generation of care through personalization all enabled by a design and production workflow built for the modern supply chain.

Congratulations to all of the winners!!!