applications feature | 3D printing Growing in three dimensions
Some of the numbers surrounding additive manufacturing (AM) are heady. According to the recently-issued Wohlers Report 2015, the global market for materials of all types (plastics and metals), equipment and services is already worth over Ð4 billion and is growing at close to 35% per year. Much of mainstream media attention is focused on desktop systems and home printing – what most people understand by 3D
printing – and this is in fact where the growth rates are the highest. But the “serious” side of the business, in professional and industrial applications, still accounts for 85% of the total market, Wohlers says. Interestingly, revenues from the production of parts for final products represent 34.7% of the entire market. That’s up from under 20% less than five years ago. As far as the numbers concerning
“When you create a layer by depositing a bead in an
FDM system, you are relying on the build platen, the support material and the model material that you are printing to all work together as a system,” Orrock notes. The adhesion between the deposited layer and the build platen needs to be strong enough to allow the material to shrink as it changes from melt to solid. “With amorphous materials, shrinkage is quite low, but with semi-crystalline materials it is really high, and this causes too much stress and the part delaminates from the build platen,” says Orrock. “So we have manipulated the crystallization kinetics to make it possible to manage that shrinkage and so get a good part.”
Stratasys FDM technology can produce technical parts, such as this PPSU valve assembly
The shrinkage problem is even worse with polyole- fins than it is with polyamides, Orrock adds. “Lots of people ask us about polypropylene, partly because it is relatively cheap. But for FDM, it is unlikely to be cheaper than other materials.”
Very big parts Several polymer majors are taking an increasing interest in additive manufacturing. One of the most prominent is Sabic. “The insights and technology developments coming from Sabic will deepen the understanding of the critical link between materials, design, processing and part performance needed to expand the technology from functional prototyping to real-world part production,” says Ernesto Occhiello, executive vice president, technology & innovation. The company says its investment in several industrial and desktop printers, including the big area additive manu-
52 COMPOUNDING WORLD | May 2015
plastics used in AM are concerned, another industry analyst, SmarTech Markets Publishing, predicted last year that the total market for all types of AM would grow to US$1.4 billion by 2019 from a then-current figure of US$310 million. It claims ABS and PLA will have the biggest growth potential out of all the materials. ❙
www.wohlersassociates.com ❙
www.smartechpublishing.com
facturing (BAAM) printer used to print the world’s first 3D-printed car for Local Motors, will help to facilitate process improvements in FFF printing processes. Sabic already offers a range of materials for use in
additive manufacturing. These include Ultem 9085 polyetherimide, most commonly used for aerospace applications, various LNP Thermocomp compounds, including the carbon-fibre-reinforced material that was used in the printing of the Strati, and Cycolac MG94, an ABS for FFF printing. Local Motors, an automotive design firm, collabo-
rated with Cincinnati Incorporated, a large-scale manufacturing system builder, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), a pioneer in advanced materials research, as well as Sabic to develop and validate the technology and materials needed to deliver large format 3D printing technology for its Strati car. Cincinnati says its BAAM machine can print polymer
components 200 to 500 times faster and 10 times larger than today’s additive manufacturing machines. One of its representatives recently described BAAM as FFF on steroids. “We use feedstock of plastic pellets like used in an injection moulding machine, so it is affordable for large production parts.” BAAM was designed to allow 3-D printing to be used for production manufacturing. Cincinnati says the ability to use commodity thermo- plastic materials means that the cost per part will be reasonable: “By designing a system with an open architecture for material vendors, material costs will be kept lower and with more options.” Techmer ES, the engineering plastics compounding subsidiary of Techmer PM, has also been working with ORNL on the BAAM process. It has developed a special carbon-fibre-reinforced grade for such applications. This material was used to produce a 3D printed Shelby Cobra replica car, which made the headlines when it was viewed by President Barack Obama during
www.compoundingworld.com
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