We’ve got an interesting week of webinars ahead: three of the ones we’re telling you about in today’s roundup are on-demand, so you can watch them whenever you want! Additionally, 3D Systems is holding three webinars this week, and the virtual AM Industry Summit is coming up as well. Read on for the details!

3D Systems Webinars: Geomagic & Figure 4

3D Systems will be busy this week, as it’s hosting three separate webinars. The first, “Discover What’s New in Geomagic^® for SOLIDWORKS^® 2021,” will take place on Tuesday, March 2nd, at 10:30 am EST. 3D Systems’ software specialist will be on hand to demonstrate the latest capabilities of Geomagic for SOLIDWORKS, such as designing and creating sketches, extracting geometries and features, and creating 3D Splines directly from point cloud data.

“3D Systems is proud to announce a new release of Geomagic^® for SOLIDWORKS! With the new capabilities available in this release, you can benefit from enhanced scan-to-CAD workflows inside of SOLIDWORKS by enabling reverse engineering directly from point clouds. Additionally, new workflow improvements speed up the overall reverse-engineering process.”

You can register for the webinar here.

The second 3D Systems webinar this week, “Empower your reverse engineering workflow with Creaform 3D scanners & Geomagic Design X,” will be on Wednesday, March 3rd, at 8 am EST. Attendees will learn the entire workflow for the handheld Creaform HandySCAN BLACK scanner, which the company calls a “plug-and-play device.” Additionally, the webinar will discuss how to follow the post-scan steps using the powerful Geomagic Design X software, and how these two tools can be combined to make reverse engineering easy.

“If your day-to-day challenge is about acquiring complex shapes in a short time, we have the perfect solution for you! Join our webinar to discover how combining the handheld scanner HandySCAN BLACK with the software Geomagic Design X can empower your reverse engineering workflow!”

You can register for this webinar here.

Finally, the last of this week’s 3D Systems webinars will also on the 3rd, at 12:30 pm EST. Featuring Barbara Miller-Webb and Kevin Marchant of MasterGraphics, along with 3D Systems application engineer Kevin Hsu, “Get More Out of 3D Printing with Figure 4 – Speed, Precision, Flexibility” will provide an introduction to 3D Systems’ Figure 4 technology. Attendees will get to hear about use cases in which the technology has been used, along with its nine major benefits and the important features and functionalities of 3D Sprint software.

“3D Systems’ Figure 4 helps you get more out of 3D printing. More speed, more precision, more flexibility, and more innovation. Figure 4 is an ultra-fast additive manufacturing technology that enables direct digital production as a tool-less alternative to traditional injection molding and urethane casting. With systems that offer expandable capacity to meet your present and future needs and access to a range of innovative materials, Figure 4 enables same-day production and prototype parts to help you do more.”

You can register for this webinar here.

ASME’s AM Industry Summit

From March 3rd-4th, the AM Industry Summit, powered by ASME, will be held online to connect like-minded 3D printing professionals and solution providers from the aerospace and energy industries. Attendees will be able to connect with experts, share knowledge, and find new ideas on how to accelerate their use of additive manufacturing. Additionally, the event will feature two virtual tours, a Lunch & Learn, online sponsor booths, interactive gameshows and trivia, video discussions, over 50 AM industry experts, and more. All of the sessions will be recorded and available for on-demand viewing until June 4th, 2021.

“AM Industry Summit connects engineering, manufacturing, product design and technology professionals across multiple industries resulting in meaningful connections, inspirational learning opportunities, and access to the latest developments in technology and innovation.”

You can register for the virtual event here. A standard pass costs $199.

AM Medical Webinar Series: Material Performance Optimization

As part of its ASME-powered AM Medical webinar series, “AM Material Performance Optimization – Improving Properties of Ti-6Al-4V Parts by AM Specific HIP Treatments” is available to watch on-demand. Hot isostatic pressing, or HIP, is often used for demanding applications, and common temperature-pressure-cycles for AM are often derived from HIP casting processes. However, these casting cycles don’t consider the specific characteristics of AM materials, which the HIP process should either amplify or get rid of in order to optimize material performance. AMPOWER’s Dr. Eric Wycisk discusses AM-specific material properties, possible HIP cycles, and part performance, and is later joined by Caitlin Oswald from Carpenter Additive and Gene Kulesha from Onkos Surgical.

“Aviation and medical are first movers in using Additive Manufacturing technologies to create parts especially from Ti-6Al-4V. To increase part performance hot isostatic pressing (HIP) is commonly used for highly demanding applications and has become a common post-process. However, the typically used temperature-pressure-cycles for AM are derived from HIP processes originally used for casting parts. These casting cycles do not consider specific characteristics of AM materials which should be amplified or annihilated by the HIP process to optimize the resulting material performance.”

You can register to watch the on-demand webinar here.

Formlabs Discusses Fuse 1 and Fuse Sift

The next on-demand webinar we’re telling you about is Formlabs’ “Introducing the Fuse 1: Learn How it Works.” The company’s SLS Engineering Director, Ian Ferguson, and an SLS Services Engineer, Andrew Balboni, introduce viewers to the Fuse 1 3D printer and its Fuse Sift powder recovery system, and explain the benefits of in-house SLS 3D printing, in addition to what and how you’re able to print on the Fuse 1 and how to recycle Formlabs’ Nylon 12 powder.

“Until now, SLS has been unavailable to most businesses, due to high costs and difficult workflows. At Formlabs, we’re changing the industry.

“We’ve designed the most approachable selective laser sintering (SLS) 3D printer, the Fuse 1. Accompanying it is the Fuse Sift, an all-in-one powder recovery station for the Fuse 1.”

You can register to watch the on-demand webinar here. Formlabs will also have versions of the webinar available in French, German, Italian, and Spanish soon.

EOS Increasing Part Performance with Metal 3D Printing

EOS has the week’s final on-demand webinar, “Boost Part Performance with Metal 3D Printing.” Experts Thomas Gradl, Business Development Manager Medical for EOS, and Jan Philippe Grage, Product & Business Development Manager 3D Printing for Dunlee, which provides tungsten 3D printed parts, explain how to use metal 3D printing to increase the performance of your applications for mass production.

“Watch our on-demand webinar featuring experts from EOS and Dunlee to learn:

• How metal 3D printing and DMLS^® technology enable serial production of applications in medical, aerospace, turbomachinery, and other industries

• How challenges along the way can be resolved easily through a strong solution-oriented partnership

• Dunlee’s successful journey from traditional to AM of the highly demanding pure tungsten anti-scatter grids for CT equipment in mass production

You can register to watch the on-demand webinar here.

Do you have news to share about any future webinars or virtual events? Please let us know!

In today’s 3D Printing News Briefs, Zortrax announced that it’s lowering the price on one of its 3D printers. Moving on to business, Fictiv is welcoming two new members to its management team, and also a new member to its board of directors, while Bluestreak I Bright AM hired a former GE Aviation employee as its new Cyber Security Officer. Finally, nTopology published a case study about a redesigned turbogenerator housing.

Zortrax Lowers Price of Inventure 3D Printer

Polish 3D printer manufacturer Zortrax launched its compact, versatile Inventure system back in 2015, and has spent the subsequent years working to improve it. Now, the company has announced that it’s cutting the price of this dual extrusion system by up to 40%. Compatible with both Zortrax and many third-party filaments, the compact Inventure is a good for medical workshops and small office spaces, and can even be used at home to fabricate custom parts and appliances. It features a closed architecture, with an enclosed print chamber and built-in carbon and HEPA filters for safer 3D printing, and the dedicated Zortrax DSS Station can be used to rinse soluble support structures off your 3D prints.

“The Inventure 3D printer has been designed for people who need comfortable, simple yet capable additive manufacturing device for work or for home. We can see that 3D printing technology becomes more and more indispensable in various fields like medicine, education, architecture or heavy industry,” said Zortrax’s Head of Marketing Natalia Jusiak. “But we also noticed a growing trend towards using desktop 3D printers at home. That’s why we have decided to cut the price of the Inventure and make it even more affordable for a wide base of customers. This way we wish to further popularize the 3D printing technology at large.”

The discounted Inventure 3D printer is available—in limited numbers—on the Zortrax website.

Fictiv Welcomes Former Jabil Employees to Team

This week, Fictiv announced that it was welcoming two new members to its management team and one to its Board of Directors—and that all three are Jabil alumni. Todd Taylor and Michael Swartz are both coming on board from Jabil company Radius Innovation & Design, and will help Fictiv grow its digital manufacturing ecosystem in enterprise markets. Taylor, who boasts over two decades of experience in design and engineering consulting, has been named the VP of Applications Engineering and will help Fictiv customers optimize their designs. Swartz spent more than 20 years working in the business development world, and is Fictiv’s new VP of Enterprise Solutions for the Consumer Electronics Division. In addition, Joanne Moretti, Fictiv’s former interim Chief Marketing Officer, is joining the company’s Board of Directors with over 30 years of experience in the technology industry under her belt, including sales and marketing leadership roles at several Fortune 500 companies.

“I am excited to join the Fictiv Board at this important growth stage for the company. My career has reinforced the need for a digital-first partner like Fictiv that can deliver on promises of quality, speed, and affordability for precision parts,” Moretti said. “I look forward to helping the team continue to build on its leadership position as the world emerges from the pandemic with an emphasis on building agile, digitally-supported supply chains.”

Bluestreak I Bright AM Hires GE Aviation Alumnus

Bluestreak I Bright AM, a division of Manufacturing Execution and Quality Management System software provider Throughput Consulting, has hired former GE Aviation Lead Manufacturing Engineer Joe Coleman as its new Cyber Security Officer. As Jean Wenzel, the company’s Director of Marketing and Education, told 3dPrint.com in an email, the DoD has had to react to a low level of compliance adoption by the Defense Industrial Base (DIB), and created the CMMC (Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification) to remedy and audit compliance with the NIST SP 800-171 regulation, which applies to any Prime contractor or subcontractor within the DoD’s supply chain. Coleman has over 35 years of experience in quality management and production, and trained and mentored aerospace engineers and designers at GE Aviation’s Additive Technology Center (ATC) on the 3D printing workflow, which includes Bluestreak’s Bright AM software. In his new role, Coleman will help customers and their vendors achieve NIST 800-171, CMMC, and DFARS (Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement) certification and compliance.

“We’re very excited to have Joe on board. His depth of additive manufacturing experience combined with his expansive knowledge of our MES/QMS software will complement our training team especially to those customers transitioning from prototype to full AM mass production,” said Throughput Consulting CEO Todd Wenzel.

nTopology Case Study on Lightweight Microturbine Housing

Florida manufacturer KW Micro Power creates high power density Auxiliary Power Units (APUs) for commercial aviation and military applications, and offers several micro generator products for different use-cases. Keeping aircraft components lightweight is hugely important, and the company worked with nTopology and VELO3D to redesign the housing for its compact, aerospace-grade turbogenerator, eventually reducing its weight by 44%. KW Micro Power followed nTopology’s fast, Field-Driven Design approach—using its integrated static and modal analysis simulation tools to confirm that the housing loads were small, removing unnecessary material to create a hollow shell with variable wall thickness, and smoothing the internal geometry so it wouldn’t need support structures during printing—and in so doing discovered that they could also add conformal cooling channels for heat management to the part, which helped lower the maximum operating temperature by 33% and improved the efficiency of the system. Additionally, VELO3D was able to print the housing in a single piece out of foundry-grade Aluminum F357 on its LPBF Sapphire 3D printer.

“I like to work with people that really know what they are doing and can push the limits of engineering,” said Enrique Enriquez, the President of KW Micro Power.

“Nothing is fast enough for me, but everything is instantaneous in nTopology. I can do the things that I want to do that are impossible with other design tools. I think this is like the renaissance of engineering. In the past, we were always working from the outside. Now, we can control every aspect of the geometry of our designs and their microstructure. If you want to make jet engines and APUs lighter and more efficient, this is the way!”

To learn more about this project, check out nTopology’s case study.

In 2016, EOS North America integrated its EOSPRINT software into Siemens’ NX software, kicking off a long partnership between the two that’s focused mainly on the advancement and adoption of industrial 3D printing. In 2018, Siemens provided automation and drive technology for EOS’s new M 300 Series and P 500 Series printers, and now the two have announced that their partnership is growing again. As part of this expanded agreement, EOS will integrate and resell Siemens’ AM software solutions with its own printers, which will unify the industrialized AM process in order to achieve more profitable AM factories.

In addition to making AM efficiency and profitability better, this integrated reseller agreement will give customers connectivity to upstream design and downstream production processes, and give them access to build preparation and optimization as well.

“With this agreement, EOS and Siemens can greatly improve the efficiency and profitability of the AM factory. Instead of only providing the build preparation for a single machine, customers can now leverage a unified process upstream to transform design, and downstream to realize high-volume AM factory production,” Aaron Frankel, Vice President of the AM Program for Siemens Digital Industries Software, said in a press release. “This unified process is critical for industrialized AM.”

This extended agreement makes it possible for EOS North America to resell products in Siemens’ industrialized AM solution as part of its Xcelerator portfolio, which has every phrase of AM development connected by one digital thread—the exact opposite of something called a point solution.

“Point solutions introduce time-consuming, error-prone inefficiencies into the AM workflow. Customers often have to interrupt their process to convert data for different software environments. And the problems with this approach are compounded with every change that’s required,” Frankel explained.

The integration of NX AM software with EOS’ job and process management software EOSPRINT 2 enables users to generate EOS build files directly in NX, defining material, exposure sets, and beam offset values, among other variables.

EOS will integrate its own EOSPRINT 2 job and process management software solution with the Siemens NX software, as well as reselling the NX AM build preparation and AM Build Optimizer software to metal 3D printing customers so they can optimize their support structures and better orient their parts. By combining these two software solutions, EOS customers will be able to have access to and use all of Siemens’ AM capabilities, such as:

• build process simulation
• design validation
• materials engineering and durability analysis
• product lifecycle management
• scheduling and execution
• design for additive
• performance monitoring
• process automation
• topology optimization

With the ability to leverage all of these combined capabilities, EOS says that its customers can rest easy with the knowledge that their 3D printed parts have been created “to best accomplish their goals of first-time-right printing.”

“The ability to offer our customers a combination of Siemens’ AM software with EOS machines is an important step toward industrializing additive manufacturing for larger-scale production. We want to ensure that our customers can be as successful printing their first part today as they will their ten-thousandth part tomorrow, which means our machines must go beyond build preparation to connect to the entire end-to-end AM process,” Andrew Snow, senior vice president of EOS North America, said in a press release. “This new agreement with Siemens will help accomplish this and we’re excited to partner with Siemens as a reseller of their AM solutions.”

According to Andrew Snow, the senior vice president of EOS North America, the integration of Siemens software and EOS hardware, will help users “be as successful printing their first part today as they will their ten-thousandth part tomorrow.” After defining their build strategy in NX, users can also get previews of the layer-by-layer hatching pattern of their EOS-printed parts before they generate the files for EOSPRINT.

One example is critical thermal components designer and manufacturer Sintavia LLC, which recently purchased two M4K-4 3D printers—basically stretched-out versions of the EOS M400-4. The company is taking advantage of the partnership between EOS and Siemens by building an end-to-end AM workflow that makes good use of the NX AM Build Preparation and AM Build Optimizer and NX AM Print Driver for EOSPRINT.

“This move by EOS North America to more tightly integrate Siemens AM software into its 3D printing systems perfectly aligns with our goal to create a seamless automated AM digital thread from design through production. If we’re going to make additive manufacturing a truly industrialized process, we need to ensure that the entire workflow is as efficient as possible,” stated Sintavia CEO Brian Neff. “A strong technical integration between EOS and Siemens software not only helps with build preparation, optimization and 3D printing, but it enables tighter connection to every other phase across the AM value chain.”

Siemens Digital Industries Software will train the EOS Additive Minds technical consulting team on how to use the NX AM and AM Build Optimizer software as part of the reseller agreement, and Additive Minds will teach EOS customers how to use Siemens’ AM software solutions. In addition, the companies have already agreed upon a framework that will offer comprehensive technical support.

A team working out of University of California at Santa Barbara has found a way to 3D print with so-called “bottlebrush” elastomers, or molecules with long “backbones” of polymers with linking polymers hanging off them. This discovery is particularly useful because the material has a novel texture: soft and elastic, much like human tissue.

Elastomers are a general name for stretchy polymers like rubber. Currently, we can print with linear elastomers, or stiffer materials made up of long, straight chains of molecules. But bottlebrush polymers are another story. So-named because they have little polymer “bristles” hanging off the linear “brush” of the main polymer, bottlebrush polymers feature a structure that allows them link together to form softer materials.

Right now, bottlebrush polymers can only be produced by more time-consuming simple molding procedures. A study published earlier this month in Science Advances might change that, however. Postdoctoral researcher Sanjoy Mukherjee discovered a new polymer by accident: a semi-soft solid that holds its shape, but will go liquid at room temperature in response to pressure (otherwise known as a yield stress fluid). This reaction is reversible, meaning that it can be liquified to pass through a syringe, and then become solid again on the other side. This property comes from the bottlebrush polymers “self-assembling” into a solid with bonds weak enough that they’ll yield under pressure.

The property means it can be printed via Direct Ink Writing: passing low-viscosity ink through a nozzle or syringe to solidify after it prints. The team, headed by Mukherjee and colleague Renxuan Xie, printed the material using a modified LulzBot TAZ Workhorse. After printing, the team bathed their test items in UV light to cure them. This was possible because of a photocrosslinker added to the polymer, which connected nearby polymers to make the printed product permanently solid.

The bottlebrush polymer can be “cured” by UV light after printing, making it permanently solid (Image via Isabelle Chabinyc/Science Advances).

The bottlebrush polymer has very unique properties. “The modulus of our material is a thousand times smaller than that of a rubber band,” said Xie. “It is super-soft—it feels very much like human tissue—and very stretchy. It can stretch about three to four times its length.”

Just as remarkably, the material is soft and stretchy without the need for water or solvents. “People often add solvent to liquify a solid so that it can be squeezed out of a nozzle,” Xie added, “but if you add solvent, it has to evaporate after printing, causing the object to change its shape or crack.”

The new polymer has the potential to be very useful, especially in printing biomimetic tissue or touch-sensitive electronics. The team is particularly excited about the potential for using it in medical applications. Their paper points out that the end groups on the polymers are benzophenones, which are generally well-tolerated by the body. And the material’s texture may help. “These super-soft elastomers might be applicable as implants,” said Christopher Bates, an assistant professor of materials, and the head of one of the labs where the research was conducted. “You may be able to reduce inflammation and rejection by the body if the mechanical properties of an implant match native tissue.”

MakerBot, a subsidiary of Stratasys (Nasdaq: SSYS) has announced that BASF Ultrafuse 316L Stainless Steel material is qualified for use with the MakerBot LABS Experimental Extruder1 for the MakerBot METHOD line of 3D printers. This makes it one of the few brands with systems explicitly qualified to use this metal 3D printing filament.

The MakerBot METHOD is unique in that it is designed for repeatability and consistency, in part due to its heated chamber. The MakerBot LABS GEN 2 Experimental Extruder opens up this series of printers to use metal filament, such as Ultrafuse 316L. It’s possible to achieve up to 96 percent of the density of pure stainless steel.

The material is said to be particularly useful for making jigs and fixtures, as well as end use parts. Examples include workholdings that will be exposed to high heat, high strength brackets for specialty machinery, and strong, lightweight, and wear-resistant robotic grippers.

BASF’s Ultrafuse 316L – Metal filament for 3D printing stainless steel parts

Bound metal printing filaments may represent a key method for introducing metal 3D printing to a wider audience at a lower cost. With them, users of desktop 3D printers can begin fabricating metal parts. Once a component is printed in something like Ultrafuse 316L, it must then be put through a debinding process and sintered in a furnace to obtain the final metal part.

This means that those wishing to print metal parts need not purchase a Metal X from Markforged, a Studio System from Desktop Metal, or the ExOne Metal Designlab. They can instead buy a spool of metal filament and begin using their desktop machines, which typically require specialty extruder nozzles for handling abrasive filaments.

At the moment, there are only very few manufacturers of such materials on the market. On one side, The Virtual Foundry produces a wide variety of metal (and ceramic) filaments but lacks the reach and financial backing of other materials companies. In contrast, BASF is the world’s largest chemical company and, so far, has only one metal 3D printing filament.

Metal parts made with BASF Ultrafuse 316LX stainless steel filament by FFF.

However, processing metal filaments is something that requires special equipment that may require some substantial capital investment. It’s worth noting that The Virtual Foundry states that debinding occurs during the sintering process and, therefore, no debinding step is required. The Virtual Foundry also offers low-cost kilns. How its materials compare to Ultrafuse is another story.

To get around the overhead investment needed for processing parts made with Ultrafuse, filament resellers like MatterHackers make it possible to connect with a service through them. Similarly, The Virtual Foundry works with Sapphire3D, who will process prints for customers, as well. Additionally, those interested in metal 3D printing filaments can have parts made by BASF subsidiary Sculpteo.

SmarTech Analysis predicts that bound metal technologies are now expected to achieve close to twice the growth rate than the overall metal AM market over the next ten years. This author is just waiting for BASF to release new materials and also a series of service providers who rely solely on printing and processing parts made with metal 3D printing filament to emerge and potentially disrupt the market.

WASHINGTON, DC — The U.S. Postal Service announced today the Garden Beauty Forever stamps are available for purchase. The stamps are being sold at Post Office locations nationwide and online at usps.com/shopstamps.

These stamps celebrate America's love of flowers and gardens with 10 new stamp designs in a booklet of 20. The stamps include a pink flowering dogwood; a rose-pink and white tulip; an allium, or ornamental onion; a pink and white Asiatic lily; a magenta dahlia; a yellow and pink American lotus; a pink moth orchid with mottled petals; a pink and white sacred lotus; an orange and yellow tulip; and a yellow moth orchid with a pink center.

Art director Ethel Kessler designed the stamps and photographer Allen Rokach took the photos that grace the stamps.  

A pictorial postmark of the designated first-day-of-issue city, Bloomfield, IN, is available at usps.com/shopstamps.

Postal Products

Customers may purchase stamps and other philatelic products through the Postal Store at usps.com/shopstamps, by calling 800-STAMP24 (800-782-6724), by mail through USA Philatelic, or at Post Office locations nationwide.

The Postal Service receives no tax dollars for operating expenses and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations.

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