Noted Bruce Bradshaw, head of Objet’s North America marketing efforts, “Our goal is to develop materials that help engineers and designers better replicate their finished product in the prototyping stage; to provide materials that match their desired end use material as closely as we can.
With today’s announcement, Objet gives you more than 100 3D printer materials to choose from.
Objet materials are classed as either base materials or Digital Materials, which are materials made from various combinations of base materials.
Objet pioneered the concept of Digital Materials where you take two base materials and, through jetting, combine them in different ways to get different mechanical properties within the same part. Thus, droplets are jetted out in a specific pattern to obtain specific properties. Once Objet engineers have determined the precise jetting pattern for a specific mechanical property, and tested it to ensure consistent and reproducible results, they release the pattern as a digital material.
Now, Objet offers 17 base materials, an addition of 3 to their previous lineup.
These materials fit into the VeroClear, the High Temperature, and the Dental family groups.
With these three new base materials, and the various combinations they have developed so far, the company is introducing 39 new Digital Materials. Several of these newer digital materials are combinations of the VeroClear rigid base materials and the Tango Black Plus rubber material family. The rubber like digital materials have a shore scale A values that range from 40 to 95.
The other group of the new Digital Materials combines the RGD525 high temperature materials with the Tango family. These materials have the same shore scale A values but deliver better resistance to high temperatures. They suit medical, automotive, and seal applications.
In addition to creating a part with toughness at one end and flexibility at the other through the Connex printers, you can also print a number of different parts, each with differing combinations of digital materials. This capability increases part production throughput.
In addition, with these systems you can build parts with different Z dimensions, pause the build when the shorter items are finished and remove them from the build, then resume printing for the taller items.
As this chart shows, Objet offers a range of materials for your prototyping needs. And, of course, more are under development. Noted Bradshaw, the number of new materials Objet could develop is almost infinite. So watch this space for more information.
Leslie Langnau
llangnau@wtwhmedia.com
Filed Under: 3D printing • additive manufacturing • stereolithography, Make Parts Fast, Rapid prototyping
