Beyond that, the ability to deploy AM systems on the front lines – not only in warfare but also disaster relief – enables users to see the logistical and supply chain benefits of AM (which tend to be rendered in the abstract) realized firsthand. To that end, Firestorm Labs, a provider of AM UAS that specializes in field-deployable additive systems, has just announced that it’s secured exclusive distribution rights from HP for mobile Multi Jet Fusion (MJF) technologies.

At the core of this agreement is Firestorm’s xCell manufacturing system, which is housed inside two expandable 20-foot containers. The system is designed to run on power generators, battery backup systems, or traditional power sources, making it functional in remote locations, such as forward operating bases and disaster zones.

According to the company, Firestorm’s goal is to create a distributed, resilient global production network where customers can leverage regional and localized supply chains to adapt to shortages, deliver products more quickly, and flexibly develop needs-based modifications to products with long lead and shipping times.

“This agreement is a game-changer,” said Ian Muceus, co-Founder and CTO of Firestorm in a press release. “For nearly a decade, we’ve trusted HP’s technology to meet high-volume, high-quality demands of polymer additive manufacturing. Now, we’re able to take that capability directly to the edge – military bases, disaster zones, and remote medical outposts – where time and logistics matter most. We’re excited to keep pushing boundaries, fine-tuning print settings, developing new materials, and maximizing throughput, material properties, and lightweighting.”

“[This is] about empowering first responders, aid organizations, and military units with the ability to manufacture solutions wherever they are,” said François Minec, VP and global head of sales and business development at HP Additive Manufacturing Solutions, in the same release. “We’re excited to help build a future where distributed, on-demand production becomes the norm and makes a difference in people’s lives. Our vision is to empower businesses and communities with scalable, localized production that enhances efficiency, reduces waste, and provides critical solutions when and where they’re needed most.”

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To my mind, it’s one of the Top 3 Perks of Trade Journalism.

(The other two in no particular order are: trying out new tech and talking to smart people.)

Most of my days are spent sitting behind a desk, so any chance I have to venture out into the wider world and actually see the stuff I write about in person is well worth the time and effort – even when it means having to drive on the I-96 in Michigan.

That’s what I kept telling myself as I (unsuccessfully) dodged potholes on the way from Detroit to Plymouth in my rental car. I’d been invited to visit the North American headquarters of Materialise along with a number of other journalists, customers and users, as part of the company’s 35^th anniversary celebration.

Here’s what I saw inside.

A tour of Materialise HQ

With nearly four decades of 3D printing under its belt, Materialise has seen the shift toward additive manufacturing (AM) first hand. As Brigitte de Vet-Veithen, the company’s CEO explained, Materialise has gone from “making it work” from the mid ‘80s to late ‘90s, “making it meaningful” up to the mid oughts, “making it valuable” up to the mid teens and, today, “making it scalable” i.e., working on true AM.

In fact, these milestones are arguably the ones that any business in the AM industry should aim to follow. Imagine setting up a AM service bureau:

• You start with 3D printing as a solution, looking for general applications (making it work);
• Then you expand into the ones that prove to be the best fit for the technology, e.g., medical devices (making it meaningful);
• Then you refine your methods and processes to enhance the business case for those applications (making it valuable);
• Then, finally, you focus on growing your business using what you’ve learned up to this point (making it scalable).

This ethos was felt in virtually every segment of our tour, from example applications to the workflows for checking and distributing products to ensure quality and on-time delivery.

Our tour began with some examples of medical applications: demonstrations of how Materialise takes scans from human patients and turns them into 3D models, resulting in literally life-changing outcomes from patients, such as tracheobronchial splints and even hand and face transplants.

Next was production planning, where Materialise employees use the company’s software tools to set up the builds for 3D printing both polymers and metals on in-house machines. For polymers, the parts are oriented and nested automatically but the metal parts need to be oriented manually by an expert, due to the added complexity of the metal 3D printing process.

From there, we went to polymer production, where we saw both EOS and 3D Systems powder bed fusion (PBF) machines that are used strictly for medical components, producing hundreds of parts each day. The powders are recycled twice before being re-sold, though recycled powders are not used in medical applications.

Verification shipping is where parts undergo a post-quality check and where traceability is assured, again processing hundreds of parts (both polymer and metal) each day. What was surprising but understandable is that this department has “peak seasons” in summer and again at the end of the year. The explanation for this is that, for medical implants, the former is due to school being out (making it a better time for physiotherapy) and the latter is due to insurance claims coming more at the end of the year.

The metal 3D printing section of the facility included GE/Concept Laser/Colibrium laser powder bed fusion (L-PBF) machines which – at least on the day I visited – were producing craniomaxillofacial (CMF) implants. This section also included post-processing, which included a band saw for removal along with hand tools for grinding and snipping and a blasting cabinet for surface finish.

Of all the stops on the tour, this was the one where I most wished I could take pictures. There’s a common sentiment that the younger generations aren’t interested in manufacturing because they falsely believe it’s dirty and dangerous. What I saw here demonstrated why that belief is mistaken: young people working in clean, comfortable rooms, doing precise tasks to prepare medical implants that will help improve people’s lives. It’s difficult to imagine a more enticing presentation of modern manufacturing.

After metal AM production, we saw the quality inspection area for metal parts where the tools included go and no-go gauges using 3D printed mimics, an optical scanning arm for CAD comparisons, and equipment for anodizing and laser marking the parts before shipping.

The stereolithography (SLA) room included a large variety of brand new and decades-old machines, with an output about halfway between the polymer PBF and metal L-PBF sections. We were also shown the SLA packing area, where CMF parts are married with other metal implants or surgical guides. This was also where test specimens are built with implants for tensile and bending checks.

There are few companies in the AM industry that have been as successful as Materialise, and after touring the company’s US headquarters, it’s easy to see why. The combination of advanced software, focus on production applications, and emphasis on playing to 3D printing’s strengths as a technology is the key to success for any business in the AM industry.

Stay tuned for Part 2.

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Sandvik counts metal powders amongst its broad portfolio of products and services and Additive Industries provides laser powder bed fusion (L-PBF) machines for AM applications, which the PLT is intended to complement.

Under the new partnership and start with gas-atomized Osprey 718 nickel-based superalloy (IN718), Osprey 316L stainless steel and Osprey Ti-6Al-4V-ELI (Grade 23) titanium alloy, Sandvik can fill the PLT under controlled conditions at the company’s production site in Sweden, then transport the PLT to customer sites for direct loading into Additive Industries MetalFab systems.

Additive Industries says this will create a complete solution for users to ensure total control of their powder feedstock materials, maintaining high quality and ensuring the health and safety of system operators, since they’ll have no contact or exposure to metal powder at any point in the process chain. The company also claims that the PLTs have been thoroughly tested and approved for road, rail and sea transport. They can contain up to 175L of metal powder which, depending on the density, can translate into about 600kg of steel powder.

Other stated benefits of PLTs for operators of MetalFab systems include:

• Full compatibility and connection of PLT with MetalFab printer

• Sensors within PLT and MetalFab to check correct powder is loaded

• Inert storage and transportation conditions for metal powders

“As the leading developer and manufacturer of gas-atomized metal powder for a wide range of advanced production technologies, we are happy to partner with Additive Industries to offer the market a state-of-the-art metal powder supply solution,” said Andrew Coleman, vice president of business unit AM, powder solutions, Sandvik, in a press release. “We are committed to using engineering and innovation to make the shift towards more industrial solutions and the PLT is a natural addition to enabling increased efficiency and safety for our customers’ staff. We look forward to continuing pushing the boundaries of metal powder for additive manufacturing technologies.”

“We recognize the critical nature of the powder feedstock in our systems, both from a quality and safety perspective, which is why the MetalFab is designed to minimize exposure of powder particles to oxygen, moisture and human contact,” said Mark Massey, CEO of Additive Industries, in the same release. “We are very pleased to announce Sandvik as our approved powder supply partner filling our PLT’s and allowing MetalFab customers to improve their quality control, health and safety and factory workflow.”

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The latest example of this comes from ETH Zurich, where an interdisciplinary research team has been working on combining conventional building materials with living organisms, such as bacteria, algae, and fungi. Now, led by Mark Tibbitt, professor of macromolecular engineering, the researches have successfully incorporated cyanobacteria into a printable hydrogel to create a material that lives, grows, and actively removes carbon dioxide from the air.

Requiring only sunlight and artificial seawater containing essential nutrients, the material is capable of absorbing more CO2 than it binds through organic growth. “This is because the material can store carbon not only in biomass, but also in the form of minerals – a special property of these cyanobacteria,” Tibbitt explained in a press release. “As a building material, it could help to store CO2 directly in buildings in the future.”

In addition to generating biomass, the cyanobacteria used in the study change the chemical environment around themselves, precipitating solid carbonates, such as lime. These minerals represent an additional carbon sink and – in contrast to biomass – store CO2 in a more stable form. As an added bonus, the carbonates also provide mechanical reinforcement, resulting in the structures slowly hardening over time.

According to the researchers, laboratory testing of the material showed that it continuously bound CO2 over a period of 400 days at a rate of 26 milligrams of CO2 per gram of material, more than three times the rate of chemical mineralization in recycled concrete (which is around 7 milligrams CO2 per gram).

More than a method for prototyping, 3D printing was essential in this application due to the need to produce optimized geometries to increase light penetration, surface aera, and the flow of nutrients. “In this way, we created structures that enable light penetration and passively distribute nutrient fluid throughout the body by capillary forces,” said Dalia Dranseike, a member of Tibbit’s team and co-first author on the published research.

The 3D printed designs have enabled the cyanobacteria to live productively for more than a year, according to the researchers. While it may one day be possible to build entire structures using this material, the next step, according to Tibbitt, is to apply it as a coating on building facades. As a proof-of-concept, two installations have been created with the material at the Architecture Biennale  in Venice and the Triennale di Milano in Milan.

The research is published in the journal Nature Communications.

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The concept of intentionally designing products to work within the constraints of the available manufacturing technology is not new. Often abbreviated as DFMA (Design for Manufacturing and Assembly), the goal is for design engineers to reduce or minimize the difficulties of manufacturing and assembling a product, thereby reducing its overall cost.

While this sounds simple in principle, in practice it requires extensive knowledge of manufacturing and assembly processes, material behaviors and supplier capabilities. As a result, DFMA encourages broad collaboration across organizations and even whole supply chains. Consequently, the engineering community has made wide efforts to advance DFMA through industry practices (such as integrated product teams), rules and guidelines (such as the Design for Manufacturability Handbook) and technical conferences (such as the ASME IDETC-CIE).

Despite the many nuances of DFMA, there are two ways to reduce the time and cost of production which apply to virtually any product in discrete manufacturing: minimizing the number of parts and eliminating fasteners. With conventional manufacturing technologies, there’s a hard limit on how far this approach could go, with designers having to weigh the time required for assembly against the complexity (and hence manufacturability) of the components involved. In other words, the geometries and physics involved in forming and machining set constraints on designs, and DMFA is about working within those constraints. 

However, with the introduction of 3D printing technologies many of those constraints have been eliminated, though certainly not all of them. Depending on the particular additive technology, there are also new constraints (such as the need for supports) that design engineers must consider.

What this means is that the objective of design for additive manufacturing (DfAM) is essentially the same as it is for DMFA: maximize product performance within the constraints of (additive) manufacturing technologies. Alternatively, you could say that DfAM is about finding a balance between the new design opportunities (complex geometries, part consolidation, lattice structures for lightweighting, etc.) and the unique constraints of 3D printing (the need for supports, part orientation, material limitations, etc.).

To sum up: the objectives of DMFA and DfAM may be the same, but the approaches necessary to achieve those objectives are considerably different.

The post DfAM vs Design for Manufacturing: What’s the difference? appeared first on Engineering.com.

Copper and copper alloys are useful in combustion chambers due to their electrical and thermal conductivity, corrosion resistance, and ductility. However, the fact that they reflect near-infrared lasers has made them difficult use in metal AM processes, such as laser powder bed fusion (L-PBF).

The latest attempt to bridge this gap comes from Farsoon Technologies, which has just announced a new FS621M-Cu system, which incorporates four 1000W ytterbium fiber lasers to process high reflective metals, including copper alloys, such as CuCrZr. In addition to the ytterbium lasers, the system also has an anti-reflective chamber coating and a smart thermal management system.

According to the company, the new system can 3D print copper alloy thrust chamber liners with optimized cooling channels as a single piece. Farsoon also claims that an aerospace customer used the FS621M-Cu platform to produce a 600 mm diameter × 850 mm height thrust chamber liner with 8.86 g/cm³ density and thermal conductivity exceeding 345 W/(m·K).

For more Farsoon news, read about the company doubling the laser count on its large-format system.

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The NASTC uses both the Stratasys F3300 and F900 3D printers to support hands-on engineering activities and develop applications for tooling solutions, including jigs, fixtures, end-of-arm tooling, and NAAMS blocks. This allows automotive and industrial users to evaluate how additive manufacturing may support operational efficiency, cost control, and production responsiveness.

Tooling plays a key role in determining production speed and cost. The NASTC aims to provide manufacturers with tested evidence that additive polymer tooling can be a practical option for production. Designed to support efficiency goals, the NASTC integrates additive manufacturing with traditional methods to offer a balance of speed, flexibility, and reliability. Key capabilities include:

• Demonstrations of how AM works within a manufacturing ecosystem using the Stratasys F3300 and F900 printers
• Additive tooling applications, including jigs, fixtures, end-of-arm tooling, and NAAMS components
• Evaluate use cases with Automation Intelligence
• Support for customer tours, validation work, and application-focused events
• A curated display of sample parts to spark new ideas and projects

Automation Intelligence supports manufacturers in adopting advanced technologies by focusing on practical implementation and production experience. Currently collaborating with several large manufacturers, the company provides guidance for navigating digital transformation. The NASTC is also intended to serve as a model for similar tooling hubs globally.

To learn more, visit stratasys.com.

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Download the PDF by filling out the form.

Your download is sponsored by Hawk Ridge Systems and A3D Manufacturing.

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However, the need to print structural supports from the same material has limited VPP in both sustainability and design freedom. But that could soon change thanks to a group of engineers at MIT who have developed a new VPP process that utilizes two different wavelengths of light.

Their key innovation is a resin that responds differently to ultraviolet and visible light: the former cures the resin into a crosslinked thermoset polymer of the sort typically produced by VPP, while the latter yields a rigid but dissolvable thermoplastic. Combing the two sources together, the engineers have been able to create parts with easily removable supports that simply dissolve when immersed in food-safe solvents such as D-limonene, ethyl acetate, and even mineral oil.

Moreover, the support material is recyclable, able to be blended back into fresh resin and used to print a new set of parts with dissolvable supports. Tests of the new system, dubbed selective solubility vat photopolymerization (SSVP) yielded functional and complex structures, including gear trains and lattices.

“You can now print – in a single print – multipart, functional assemblies with moving or interlocking parts, and you can basically wash away the supports,” said MIT graduate student Nicholas Diaco in a press release. “Instead of throwing out this material, you can recycle it on site and generate a lot less waste. That’s the ultimate hope.”

Diaco and his colleagues report that they were able to synthesize their dual-wavelength resin using a mixture of two commercially available monomers, along with a third “bridging” monomer that linked the other two together under UV light.

“With all these structures, you need a lattice of supports inside and out while printing,” Diaco said. “Removing those supports normally requires careful, manual removal. This shows we can print multipart assemblies with a lot of moving parts, and detailed, personalized products like hearing aids and dental implants, in a way that’s fast and sustainable.”

“We’ll continue studying the limits of this process, and we want to develop additional resins with this wavelength-selective behavior and mechanical properties necessary for durable products,” said professor of mechanical engineering John Hart in the same release. “Along with automated part handling and closed-loop reuse of the dissolved resin, this is an exciting path to resource-efficient and cost-effective polymer 3D printing at scale.”

The research is published in the journal Advanced Materials Technologies.

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Through a combination of 3D Systems’ applications expertise, direct metal printing (DMP) technology, and Oqton’s 3DXpert software, the researchers are developing new processes to build embedded, high-temperature passive heat pipes for titanium heat rejection radiators. According to 3D Systems, these 3D printed radiators are 50% lighter per area with increased operating temperatures compared to the current state-of-the-art.

In addition, the team at Penn State has also developed a process to 3D print functional parts using nickel titanium (aka nitinol) shape memory alloys (SMAs) that can be passively actuated and deployed when heated. The researchers believe a passive SMA radiator will have a deployed-to-stowed area ratio roughly six times larger than conventional satellite radiators, making them particularly useful for CubeSats.

The researchers designed the SMA radiator with an embedded integral porous network inside the walls of the heat pipes, then manufactured the radiators in a single piece from titanium and nitinol using DMP. According to 3D Systems, the titanium-water heat pipe radiator prototypes were successfully operated at temperatures of 230°C and weigh 50% less than conventional designs.

“Our long-standing R&D partnership with 3D Systems has enabled pioneering research for the use of 3D printing for aerospace applications,” said Alex Rattner, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Penn State, in a press release. “The collective expertise in both aerospace engineering and additive manufacturing is allowing us to explore advanced design strategies that are pushing the boundaries of what is considered state-of-the-art.”

“Thermal management in the space environment is an ideal application for our DMP technology,” said Mike Shepard, vice president for aerospace and defense at 3D Systems, in the same release. “[It] is an extremely common engineering challenge and the DMP process can deliver solutions that are effective for many industries including aerospace, automotive, and high-performance computing/AI datacenters.”

For more information on 3D printing for space-based applications, including further commentary from Shepard, check out 3 challenges for 3D printed space-based components.

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