German company Additive Elements has announced the launch of its AE12 binder jet material system developed with Voxeljet industrial 3D printers.
The announcement was made at this weeks Rapid.Tech exhibition in Erfurt, Germany. Additive Elements is the sister company of SLS post-processing company DyeMansion and aims to provide a more functional material for binder jet printing.
In addition to the launch, Additive Elements received a start-up award at the event for its recent innovations.
Applying function to binder jetting
With the AE12 material system, which was announced last year, Additive Elements believe more functional parts can be produced on binder jetting systems. Binder jetting is primarily used to create molds out of sand or gypsum.
By unlocking the potential for less porous parts, Additive Elements hopes to enable the use of post-processing methods and provide faster and cheaper outputs in relation to Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) machines.
Compared to SLS, the company believes it can produce 30% cheaper parts with its system. CEO and Co-Founder of Additive Elements, Thilo Kramer explains this as he states,
With our new process, we address lots of different markets. Beside low production costs and scalability, one of the biggest advantages is the “easy to finish” surface. Our focus is on large parts for prototyping, positive molds for vacuum casting, lampshades and hopefully many more in the future.
With the ability to create large parts of up to a metre in length, binder jetting technology has significant potential. The 3D printing technique can be used as part of a forging operation, for example the recreation of a 103 year-old car engine. The first customer to make use of the new material is German 3D printing bureau Formise. The CEO – Peter Spitzwieser – says,
Seeing the machine and the process from Additive Elements is really impressive. With SLS, large parts are way too expensive for a lot of applications. Now we are finally able to realize projects that we had to reject a year before, because of the price.
Realizing the potential
Johannes Günther, senior developer at Additive Elements, explains the company is now “already working on flexible plastics on lab-scale.” Günther believes Additive Elements will now “release the full power of the technology”,
We believe that the power of the Binder Jetting technology is strongly underestimated. With AE12, Binder Jetting is finally able to adapt post processing solutions like automated depowdering or surface treatment due to higher stability of the parts.
For all the latest 3D printing news, subscribe to the most widely read newsletter in the 3D printing industry, follow us on twitter and like us on Facebook.
Featured image shows Additive Elements’ Johannes Günther (Senior developer) and Thilo Kramer (CEO & CO-Founder) accepting the Messe Erfurt Start-up Award. All images, unless otherwise stated, via Additive Elements.
