News and Insights of 3D Printing and Manufacturing
GE’s Additive Technology Center – or ATC – is located along Interstate 75, near Cincinnati, in Ohio. From the outside, the building looks like many of the low, gray boxes in this industrial area. But step inside it houses the world’s largest and most advanced 3D printing facility and development center.
EnvisionTEC and EasyRx, a developer of orthodontic prescription software, today announced the integration of their software for ease of use. EasyRx allows users to submit, manage and track orthodontic lab prescriptions, including preparing and labeling them for 3D printing. Now, EasyRx users can simply launch an STL file in EnvisionTEC’s Perfactory software by clicking the EnvisionTEC logo within EasyRx. Users can now go from digital scan to 3D print faster than ever before.
With lots of exciting additive manufacturing industry news coming in last week from RAPID+TCT and Hannover Messe, this week seems to be dominated by another industry: the medical sector. So far, we’ve seen new 3D printed implants from Medtronic, EnvisionTEC partnerships and financial announcements from CollPlant from the medical tech, dental and bioprinting fields. Find today’s highlights below:
After a rigorous yearlong application process, metal additive manufacturing company Sintavia, LLC. has successfully received National Aerospace and Defense Contractors Accreditation Program (NADCAP) approval for its laser and electron beam powder bed fusion technologies. With the NADCAP accreditation under its belt, the company will be able to further pursue and advance aerospace applications with its metal AM systems.
Software, tech and industrial giant Siemens has been making very significant investments – and closing very important partnerships – in the world of Additive Manufacturing, a family of technologies that the company views as absolutely strategic for the future. While these moves have directly involved all major AM technologies, after visiting the Siemens Additive Manufacturing Experience Center in the Nuremberg HQ, it seems clear that the company believes its software’s capabilities can bring the most benefits to deposition technologies: both extrusion (FDM) for composites and directed energy deposition (DED) for metals.
Though RAPID+TCT 2018 may have wrapped up last week, the news from the additive manufacturing event is still rolling in. One of the exciting announcements from the event comes from New York-based metal 3D printing company Vader Systems, which presented three new AM offerings based on its patented Magnet-o-Jet technology. The three new systems include the Vader Polaris liquid metal 3D printing system, the Magnet-o-Jet Subsystem for hybrid manufacturing equipment integration and the Ares Microsphere Production System.
Every major system manufacturer and adopter is working on innovations that could make current DED and metal PBF technologies able to deliver larger parts at lower costs. Australia based Titomic already has that capability and is instead working on getting the word out on its Titomic kinetic fusion technology, which can already 9-meter titanium parts, at supersonic speeds and drastically lower material costs.
Looking back over the last decade, it is clear from the vantage point of 2017 that additive manufacturing (AM) has caused significant disruption in the medical sector. Indeed, in no other sector has AM had such a profound and dramatic effect on the human condition in terms of improving lives — whether directly at the point of need within clinical environments or communities or indirectly as a manufacturing method for greatly improved medical devices. Currently, despite the direct approach dominating many ‘3D Printing’ headlines as surgeons and clinicians increasingly embrace the AM systems at the point of need for patient-specific applications, it is the latter, indirect approach, that has seen significant results for higher volume, serial production with AM by medical device manufacturers.
While 3D printing has now been around for over thirty years, and some 3D printing designers have been exploring the technology since then, until recently, there was no clear-cut approach to fully exploiting the technology’s potential for near-limitless geometries. The recent rise in the adoption of the acronym DfAM (Design for Additive Manufacturing) – which collects under its umbrella a plethora of terms such as parametric and generative design, topology optimization, lattice structures and biomimicry – is an indication that these ideas are making their way into the creative collective consciousness.
CELLINK, a leading manufacturer of affordable bioprinters, introduced a new beating heart-shaped logo. After many months of planning the company chose an icon to represent its brand for the three pillars that are near and dear to the company’s soul: Family, Compassion/Love, and creating the future of medicine together with Science and Technology. The idea of a beating CELLINK heart also clearly identifies the ultimate long-term goal for all bioprinting technologies: creating functional complex organs that can be used to improve and extend human lives.