Latest in 3D + additive manufacturing (AM)

PHOTO COURTESY OF B9CREATIONS

Medical-grade silicone resin

B9Creations launched an elastomeric resin, BioRes – Silicone, enabling customized medical and consumer tech applications for comfortable skin contact products. Offering a unique combination of biocompatibility, high precision, surface finish, and tear resistance, the medical-grade silicone is ISO 90993 certified for prolonged skin contact up to 30 days.

“This material has really opened up our design space and it’s also saving us a ton of money because we aren’t using pure Teflon, and now we’re able to quickly reiterate designs. So, if there’s a shift in our fixture, we can always compensate and easily make a new one,” says Kevin Herrera, senior engineer specializing in cardiovascular medical devices at Johnson & Johnson.

B9Creations’ medical and industrial silicone materials bend, compress, and hold up to repeated cycles without tearing. Coupled with B9Creations’ Core 5 Series Med XL 3D printers, automated cleaning and curing units, biocompatible and engineering resins, and intelligent print preparation software, users can move seamlessly from prototyping to production.

https://www.b9c.com
GRAPH COURTESY OF POLYMAKER

Partnership for FFF-based solutions

A strategic partnership between AMESOS and Polymaker will co-develop high-speed fused filament fabrication (FFF)-based 3D printing solutions.

Shanghai-based Polymaker develops and manufactures a large variety of materials for extrusion-based 3D printing. AMESOS was formed as a spin-off of Singapore-based Akribis Systems, where the teams have been working on 3D printing for the past 5 years. The deep technical capabilities in motor design and motion control from Akribis allowed the team to design 3D printing systems in ways very different from the status-quo. The goal of this partnership is to co-develop a high-speed FFF-based 3D printing solution, FFF 2.0.

To tackle the process complexity, Polymaker will also bring in Helio Additive, a startup which Polymaker helped co-found. Helio Additive is developing a software solution that combines physics-based simulation and data science to guide the development and optimization of printing processes. Helio’s software tool will be vital to the partnership’s success.

https://polymaker.com
PHOTO COURTESY OF WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM

Additive Manufacturing White Paper

The World Economic Forum released a white paper, “An Additive Manufacturing Breakthrough: A How-to Guide for Scaling and Overcoming Key Challenges,” now available for download. Authors of the paper note that, for more than a decade, manufacturing leaders have seen cycles of hype associated with additive manufacturing (AM). Not all predictions and forecasts have become reality, but AM still manages an average yearly growth rate of 20%.

Four best practices and three real-world case studies to show paths for overcoming the prevalent current challenges of AM are highlighted in the paper.

The authors aim to help senior industry executives better understand how they can leverage AM to realize more resilient, inclusive, flexible, and sustainable production systems, and to incubate new collaborations and partnerships by mobilizing the global manufacturing community.

https://www3.weforum.org
March 2022
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