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With the discharge of HP’s Multi Jet Fusion, the world started to see the truth of 3D printing for serial manufacturing, main additive manufacturing (AM) stalwart Stratasys to kick up its funding into high-speed sintering (HSS) at Xaar. Quickly sufficient, Stratasys launched its personal mass sintering expertise, selective absorption fusion (SAF), and scooped up Xaar’s 3D printing outfit, Xaar 3D Ltd, fully.
Now, we’re starting to see the probabilities of SAF for collection manufacturing, as German design firm DQBD GmbH has relied on Stratasys’s SAF system, the H350 3D printer, to 3D print a number of load bearing components for a brand new bike saddle at scale. The corporate claims that it saves £22,000 in prices throughout product improvement to manufacturing and reduces lead occasions from three to 6 months to only 10 days in comparison with conventional injection moulding strategies, with tooling prices fully eradicated.
“We had at all times deliberate for AM to play a pivotal position within the creation of SAM – our biking saddle,” says Sebastian Hess, CEO at DQBD. “Actually, we designed the saddle with additive manufacturing in thoughts. In addition to delivering constantly correct, production-grade components at quantity shortly and affordably, the expertise affords a singular alternative to personalize merchandise in a manner that can not be replicated with conventional strategies.
The SAM bike seat is made up of a personalised, semi-rigid 3D printed backbone which then has a seat unhealthy thermoformed round it, permitting clients to tailor the product to their wants. This contains using strain level and weight distribution mapping meant to match the match of the rider’s physique. A mix of inflexible and versatile areas of the saddle’s backbone are designed to supply help and elasticity the place mandatory.
Consisting of a semi-rigid, personalised 3D printed backbone and a 3D thermoformed seat pad, the saddle was designed with additive manufacturing in thoughts. Picture courtesy of Stratasys.
“We put the saddle by means of rigorous testing together with affect energy, strain, and fatigue resistance to make sure that it met trade requirements and our personal excessive expectations,” says Hess. “The PA11 materials on the H350 was an amazing match for the additively manufactured components because it affords us excessive ductility, excessive affect and excessive fatigue resistance which was important for our design.”
The corporate claims that the saddle can be extra sustainable, because of the lack of glue concerned and the power to separate the person parts and reused for future manufacturing. Moreover, the Stratasys Excessive Yield PA11 from which it’s made is derived from “sustainably grown” castor oil.
Yann Rageul, Head of Manufacturing Enterprise Unit EMEA & Asia at Stratasys provides: “We’re seeing a particular development in companies’ readiness for quantity manufacturing of finish use components. DQBD is showcasing how the H350 and its SAF expertise can’t solely optimize the complete manufacturing course of with beneficial time and price financial savings, but in addition reveals the deployment of AM for really distinctive and superior designs – prepared for manufacturing at scale. We’re proud to see that the SAM saddle design DQBD created reveals the developments of additive manufacturing throughout the product improvement cycle – because the product idea was designed round AM from the beginning.”
The assembled saddle with 3D printed backbone and 3D fashioned cowl. Picture courtesy of Stratasys.
The undertaking not solely demonstrates the potential for SAF, but in addition the way in which by which the trade is altering. As said by the Stratasys and DQBD reps, that is an instance of a product being designed with additive in thoughts from the get-go with a expertise able to carrying it out. That is just the start, as extra corporations develop their very own variations of HSS or different mass AM strategies. Consider voxeljet, which has licensed Xaar’s HSS course of, or Azul 3D, which has used large-scale steady digital gentle processing to provide components for Wilson. We will’t overlook Carbon, both, who has already demonstrated massive batch manufacturing of midsoles for adidas footwear.
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