News and Insights of 3D Printing and Manufacturing
Once known as a maker favorite, Lulzbot 3D printer manufacturer Aleph Objects, Inc. has branched out significantly in recent years, bringing to market professional desktop systems and 3D printer accessories to improve the viability of desktop printing for industrial use. Now, the company is entering a whole new domain in the additive sphere: bioprinting.
Zenith Tecnica, a New Zealand-based titanium additive manufacturing company, has had quite the journey since its founding in 2014, becoming one of the country’s leading forces in the metal AM sector. Today, Zenith Tecnica continues to scale its business and expand its 3D printing capabilities with the installation of its fourth and fifth GE Additive Arcam EBM machines.
One of the best things about 3D printing is that the technology has been used for versatile applications in a growing range of sectors. A particularly interesting example comes from the world of product design, with the work of Italian architect Marcello Ziliani, who used 3ntr’s 3D printing technology for the creation of stylish home furnishing products.
Canadian additive manufacturing specialist Burloak Technologies, a division of Samuel, Son & Co., is launching its customer collaboration program, AM-Works, which will enable customers to further exploit the benefits of additive manufacturing through an expertly tailored service.
Aerospace company Relativity has signed an agreement with NASA and secured an incentive package from the Mississippi Development Authority for the expansion of facilities at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Hancock County, MS. The historic facility first opened in 1961 and is today NASA’s largest rocket engine testing site.
German 3D scanning company Thor3D has announced a strategic partnership with Canadian 3D scanning specialist Polyga Inc. The collaboration will be mutually beneficial as it will see Thor3D and its partners become resellers of Polyga’s XTract3D software, while Vancouver-based Polyga will take on the role of distributor for Thor3D’s Calibry 3D scanners on Canada’s West Coast.
One of the next key evolutionary phases of additive manufacturing is the full implementation of AI, machine learning and computer vision systems into the AM process in order to catch, eliminate and even correct errors, while improving the overall build process. We know that many experts are working on this, just a couple of days we reported about the Inkbit system that spun off from MIT CSAIL. Now it’s the turn of another company that is so much based on AI that it is even part of its name: London based Ai Build.
Throughout history, many Italian geniuses did not reap the benefits of their inventions. Just think of Galileo, excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Church for having understood the motion of planets. Or more recently Meucci who invented the telephone only to have Graham Bell obtain the patent and build an empire with it. Many great visionaries had to leave Italy — and continue to have to leave Italy — to find someone willing to finance their ventures, starting with Columbus, who turned to the queen of Spain in order to set sail on the voyage that would lead to the Americas. The story of Enrico Dini, the man who invented the idea of 3D printing concrete houses by binder jetting, is in many ways a modern version of these: a modern odyssey for the future of construction, one that shares some similarities with these great stories.
The decision by Microsoft and Autodesk to not take out a major sponsorship for this year’s Bay Area Maker Faire proved to be the tipping point for Maker Media, forcing the company to shut down. Dale Dougherty, founder of the company that published MAKE magazine and ran the Maker Faire series of global events confirmed it to TechCrunch yesterday.
After a lot of post-processing and fine-tuning we are ready to present the first 3dpbm interactive map of commercially available 3D printing technologies. The different technologies are divided into five major material families (metals, polymers, ceramics, composites and bioinks) and listed with the most relevant AM hardware manufacturers for each technology.