News and Insights of 3D Printing and Manufacturing
Plenum, a Brazil-based biomedical company, recently adopted two Lithoz CeraFab 7500 3D printers to support the production of next-gen bone implants. The purchase and installation marks an exciting step into Brazil’s AM industry for Lithoz, an Austrian specialist in high performance ceramic 3D printing.
Additive manufacturing has the potential to reach true industrial scale. Propelling it toward that goal are innovations in materials, hardware and software, but holding it back are regulatory and technical challenges yet to be overcome. These innovations and challenges will be the focus of the third annual Munich Technology Conference on Additive Manufacturing, MTC3, taking place October 8–10 at the Technical University of Munich in Germany.
Cubicure, an Austrian supplier of industrial polymers for additive manufacturing, has announced a strategic R&D partnership with specialty chemicals company Evonik through which they will develop and bring to market highly viscous polyester resins for Cubicure’s Hot Lithography (HL) technology.
Almost exactly a year ago, we covered an additive manufacturing case study involving Safran Electrical & Power, a France-based specialist in electrical systems for commercial and military aircraft, and British manufacturing firm Betatype. At the time, the companies were working together to redesign and optimize an electrical generator housing for aircraft and saw promising results with improved part strength and stiffness and weight reduction.
Think of her what you will (that she is moved by larger interest groups or that she is being used for notoriety) but there is no doubt that young Greta Thunberg is now in the global spotlight and has done more than anyone to raise awareness on the need for eco-sustainability. By bringing attention to the relative issue of global warming, she has also indirectly driven attention toward the real issue that is affecting life on this planet: pollution. Be it from CO2 emissions, radioactivity, poisonous chemicals or plastic. The issue of plastic pollution – and by extent ocean plastic pollution – is the one that concerns (or should concern) the AM industry more directly. Since 3D printing provided a new way to process plastic, it can be a part of the problem or a part of the solution. Plastic Bank, an entity created in 2013, has carried out some interesting activities to enable recycling of ocean-bound plastic in some of the world’s poorest communities, by attempting to transform used plastic into currency. In the organization’s initial idea, 3D printing was expected to play a part as a means to process used plastic. That may not have happened yet, however, it could, in the future, be used to process some of the 5 million kilograms of plastic that Plastic Bank has recovered over the past 6 years.
FATHOM, an advanced manufacturer with expertise in 3D printing and additive manufacturing, has been acquired by CORE Industrial Partners (“CORE”), a Chicago-based private equity firm. The acquisition will bring together FATHOM and Midwest Composite Technologies (“MCT”), acquired by CORE in 2018, to form one of the largest privately-held digital manufacturing service providers in North America.
WASP, the first and leading Italian manufacturer of advanced Delta 3D printers, has been pushing the additive manufacturing industry in new directions since it was founded by Massimo Moretti in 2012. The company’s latest evolutions are now heading towards leveraging the consolidated and highly reliable kinematics of its delta systems to address industrial-level end-use part production. With the introduction of the new Delta WASP INDUSTRIAL 4.0 line, the company supports the use of production-grade materials – such as Nylon Carbon – for a growing range of products. One such application highlights the versatility and accessibility of the Delta WASP 2040 INDUSTRIAL 4.0 for a racing team – competing in the Campionato Italiano Velocità (Italian Speed Championship) – to bring, for the first time, a 3D printer inside the box, producing real racing parts.
A UK-based team of engineers from Jaguar Land Rover are putting their skills to work by designing a lightweight 3D printed glove that can be worn by people working on the company’s production line. The glove—part of the team’s effort to create next-gen protective workplace gear—could help to prevent musculoskeletal disorders caused by production line duties.
PrinterPrezz, a California company specializing in combining metal 3D printing, nanotechnologies and surgical expertise to design and manufacture next-generation medical devices, revealed that work is currently ongoing on new spinal interbody fusion devices in collaboration with Osseus Fusion Systems, a Dallas-based medical device company focused on spine products.
Continuous Composites and Arkema are partnering, through the chemical giant’s Sartomer business line, to combine Continuous Composites’ patented continuous fiber 3D (CF3D) printing technology with Arkema’s cutting edge photocurable resin solutions, thus providing many interesting new options for continuous fiber composite AM.