When designing medical device components, you don’t need to choose between additive manufacturing and metal injection molding. Think of them as complementary
Nick Eidem, Advanced Powder Products
[Metal injection molding image courtesy of Advanced Powder Products]
In today’s drive toward optimization, where projects survive or collapse in terms of days rather than weeks, it is imperative to consider all available prototyping venues. Time to market is especially critical in the medical field, where product maturation curves are shorter and regulatory efforts are extensive. In addition, moving a component from concept to production is often an arduous process; it needs to be accurate, repeatable and well documented.Metal injection molding (MIM) technology can efficiently and economically deliver thousands or millions of parts. Still, it relies upon custom-designed and built hard tooling — the simpl…