News and Insights of 3D Printing and Manufacturing
Carbon, a Silicon Valley-based digital 3D manufacturing company, today announced the addition of partners Bright Plastics, Dependable Plastics, Diversified Plastics, Element Packaging, Gallagher Plastics, Nicolet Plastics, Prattville Machine & Tool, and Resolution Medical to its Carbon Production Network, which now includes more than 20 U.S. partners and is rapidly growing.
Direct metal and polymer part 3D printing may still require several years to establish itself as a true production technology. PBF systems – especially the metal ones – still have to overcome several challenges limiting their productivity while production-ready binder jetting technologies still need to hit the market entirely. On the other hand, there are almost no real reasons why sand binder jetting technologies for mold-making and tooling are not yet widely adopted (other than a general and still widespread lack of awareness). This may finally be changing as one of the leading manufacturers of said technology, voxeljet, closed a major deal with a German automaker to bring up to 20-30 VJET X systems in-house over the next ten year period, starting with two in 2019 and three more shortly thereafter.
What’s better than one 3D printing construction robot? Scientists from NTU Singapore would likely say two construction robots. And seeing what the research team has been capable of, I can’t say I disagree.
Despite having released its first resin-based 3D printer last month, Polish 3D printer manufacturer Zortrax has not forgotten its roots in the deposition world. In fact, the company has just released its newest 3D printer model, the M300 Plus, a large-format desktop machine. With a build capacity of 300 x 300 x 300 mm, Zortrax’s new 3D printer boasts the same build volume as its existing M300 model with a handful of new features.
Frustum, a Boulder, Colorado-based software company, is releasing Windows OS Frustum GENERATE, its industry-leading interactive generative design solution. Previously available as a web-app or add-on, GENERATE represents a new paradigm for design, interactive generative design, which fundamentally alters how products are modeled for manufacture by allowing engineers to interact and iterate in real time with generative design models. As a result, engineers can develop multiple perfectly designed and optimized models to identify the best solution in a matter of minutes versus hours or days previously.
Ingersoll Machine Tools, Inc. long-awaited “largest 3D printer in the world” is now ready. With a gargantuan work envelope measuring W 23’ x H 10’ x L 46’, the WHAM composite 3D printer was originally announced as a partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2016. The goal was to develop massive 3D printers leveraging the Department of Energy’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility at ORNL.
Most industries would agree that there is no going back on additive manufacturing. The technology, which is opening up new avenues and possibilities for manufacturing across the board, is here to stay. Still, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t still hurdles and challenges that manufacturers have to overcome, including driving costs down for the technology, establishing standards and, perhaps most crucially, increasing process automation.
The idea of DfAM (Design for Additive Manufacturing) explores how parts can be designed specifically to leverage the expanded geometric possibilities afforded by additive manufacturing technologies. Until now this approach – implemented primarily by forward-thinking engineers – has focused on lattices and trabecular structures to reduce a part’s weight. However, this may be just a scratch on the proverbial surface as many other possibilities exist to exploit mold-less production. For example, the creation of “without-end” designs to replace complex multi-part assemblies. This is exactly what designer Steve Jenkins did in the Continuous Loop Bicycle project recently published on the Yanko Design network.
BigRep, a leader in large-scale thermopolymer extrusion 3D printers, and Bosch Rexroth, one of the world’s leading suppliers of drive and control technologies, are partnering to equip state-of-art CNC control systems and drives on its next generation of BigRep-Bosch Rexroth powered systems.
Always at the cutting edge, MIT’s Mediated Matter lab has developed a new, experimental additive manufacturing technique that uses a swarm of small robots to build up tubular structures. The process, called FIBERBOTS, can enable the digital fabrication of large-scale architectures with high spatial resolution.