Additive Industries (which recently opened a U.S. office) supplies systems for production-scale metal additive manufacturing. Modules allow for 3D printing metal parts through selective laser melting and heat treating those same parts within a continuous line, as well as manual unloading via a separate operator module kept isolated from the metal powder. At Formnext, the company showed its latest unit for this system, a Product Removal Module that provides for in-line separation of the parts from their build plate and resurfacing of the same plate. The mechanism of these operations is machining, and the module is essentially a machine tool tailored to automated production AM. Read more [source: additivemanufacturingmedia]