Taking Powder Out of the Equation
by HILOS
Constraints?
We've got plenty of them. We chose powder bed printing technology because of its look and finish as well as performance and environmental impact, but there are two drawbacks: cost and cleaning out the powder.
Powder printing
Our parts are made by scanning and sintering layers of TPU powder together, layer by layer, thousands of layers at a time. That allows us to engineer internal bodies and architect new material performance tuned at the voxel level, taking what used to be a dozen different materials glued together and instead printing one piece embodying the performance of the former glue sandwich.
The drawback is that the cavities between printed areas are left with powder in them, so every part needs to be engineered for easy powder removal. This is a huge part in our Dfam process (design for additive manufacturing) and one of the ways we allow for designs to be actually manufacturable with this new technology.
