INNOVATION | 3D PRINTING
Pricing for the HP Jet Fusion 3D 3200 Printer starts at $130,000. HP says that, based on internal testing and simulation, HP Jet Fusion 3D printing solution average printing time is up to 10 times faster than FDM (fused deposition modelling) and SLS (selective laser sintering) technologies priced between $100,000 and $300,000 (as of April 2016). Average printing cost-per-part is half the cost of comparable FDM and SLS printer solutions, said HP. This February, the company announced the
Above: HP Jet Fusion 4210 in a production setting
the gap between single part production and high-volume production. However, the develop- ments go very fast.” A widespread reservation about 3DP is the
belief that it is not suited for final parts production, due to the material properties of 3DP parts or poor surface finishing, EuPC notes. “Development and improvements in 3DP processes are however progressing fast. “The biggest barrier to the use of 3DP in the plastics converting industry probably are the high costs of machines and materials, but this is pre- sumed to change soon. The rise of the economies of scale effect will make 3DP applications cheaper. The same applies for 3DP materials, especially as global companies have started to develop 3DP materials.”
Multi Jet Fusion bows in One of the most interesting new 3DP technologies to appear in recent months comes from one of the top players in 2D printing, HP. The company says that it has taken less than a year for it to become the leading provider of production-grade plastics 3D printers with its Multi Jet Fusion technology. “Our 3D printing platform is unique in its ability to
Right: Components manufactured with HP’s 3D printing Multi Jet Fusion technology
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address over 340 million voxels [the 3D equivalent of a pixel in 2D photos] per second, versus one point at a time, giving our prototyping and manufacturing partners radically faster build speeds, functional parts and breakthrough economics,” says Stephen Nigro, president of HP’s 3D printing business. HP opened its offering with two
printers. The Jet Fusion 3D 3200 is said to be ideal for prototyping, while the Jet Fusion 3D 4200 is intended for prototyp- ing and short-run manufacturing needs.
INJECTION WORLD | June 2018
lower-priced 300/500 series, which starts at between $50,000 and $60,000. They go on sale in the second half of this year. At the Additive Manufacturing Users Group (AMUG) conference in St. Louis, US, in April, Nigro said that in the previous year, more than three million parts were produced on Multi Jet Fusion and more than 50% were for end use. The company is one of its own biggest customers: half of the plas- tics parts inside the Jet Fusion 4200, and over 140 parts inside the new Jet Fusion 300/500 Series, can be produced using Multi Jet Fusion technology. HP says a key innovation in its technology is a high-speed, synchronous architecture for building parts layer by layer. Dual carriages scan across the working area in perpendicular directions: one carriage recoats the working area with fresh material, and the other prints HP functional agents and fuses the printed areas. The entire surface is then heated by an infrared
lamp. Only the fusing agent absorbs the heat and transmits it to the powder particles. These fuse into the prescribed structure while the surrounding material remains unaffected. The vision for HP Multi Jet Fusion technology is
to create parts with controllably variable—even quite different— mechanical and physical properties within and across a single part or among separate parts printed simultaneously in the build unit. This is accomplished by the use of “transforming agents” to control the interaction of the fusing and detailing agents with each other and with the material to be fused. “Depositing transforming agents voxel-by- voxel across each layer allows HP Jet Fusion 3D printers to produce parts that cannot be made by other methods,” the company says. Properties that HP transforming agents could control within and across a part include dimen- sional accuracy and detail; surface roughness, texture, and friction coefficient; tensile
strength, flexibility, hard- ness; electrical and thermal
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