Additive manufacturing giant trains its sights on the mould

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ETMM: There has been a lot of talk about using 3D plastic printing technology for mould making. Do you have anything new in this area?

Middleton: We’ve had some great breakthroughs just recently on the Polyjet side in the materials. When we are making the moulds, one of the big challenges we faced was having a material that would withstand the heat during short runs. Turn the clock back two years, and our material would start deforming at 50 degrees. Then it went up to 80 degrees, and then we hit 100 degrees, and now we are well in excess of that.

ETMM: How do you expect this to progress?

Middleton: What you will see is better materials with higher thermal properties coming from the Polyjet side, which is going to widen the area in which additive moulds can be created. This is where it is going. We are not looking for a new technology, we’re going to improve existing Polyjet technology through more thermally resistant materials.

ETMM: Are we talking about ABS?

Middleton: We are talking about what we call ‘ABS-like’ materials. It’s a digital ABS because it’s a composite mixed from two components, one giving it strength and the other giving it thermal resistance.

ETMM: Are there any specific projects underway at the moment that you are at liberty to discuss?

Middleton: We’ve had really tremendous results, for example, at Lego, where they have been testing for us (the ability) to do short-run production using moulds that were additively built on the Polyjet technology.

ETMM: That’s a big company. What kind of production runs are we talking about with this material?

Middleton: To be very clear, at the moment we are only conducting very short run lengths into the several hundreds.

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Interview

Additive manufacturing giant trains its sights on the mould