3D Printing Materials

Thermoplastics materials developer UBQ Materials has won the Speculative Design category at the 24th annual South by Southwest (SXSW) Innovation Awards for its waste-based 3D printing filament. The material is the first waste-based 3D printing material made with UBQ, the company’s ‘climate positive’ thermoplastic, which was designed to enable additive manufacturing with a significantly reduced carbon footprint. “3D printing enables manufacturers across industries the option to design complex products with near immediate customizations that otherwise might be impossible to produce using conventional manufacturing methods,” said Tato Bigo, Co-CEO and Co-founder of UBQ Materials. “The use of UBQ in the printing filament offers manufacturers the ability to gain the benefits of 3D printing, while capitalizing on the reduced carbon footprint enabled by UBQ.” UBQ Materials has won the 2022 SXSW Innovation Award for Speculative Design. Photo via UBQ Materials. Converting waste into thermoplastics UBQ Materials has developed a patented advanced conversion…    read more 

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have come up with a novel plant-derived 3D printable composite that could pave the way for the sustainable production practices of the future.  Concocted from a mixture of synthetic plastic and cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs), chains of organic polymers found naturally in plantlife, the material has a highly-reinforced brick-and-mortar structure, akin to that of a mollusk’s inner shell.  By pushing the CNC content of this composite as high as 90%, the team has managed to fortify it to the point that they say it’s “tougher than some types of bone and harder than typical aluminum.” In doing so, the engineers have also significantly reduced the material’s petrol content, thus it could now unlock the more sustainable 3D printing or casting of parts with as-yet-unseen properties.  “By creating composites with CNCs at high loading, we can give polymer-based materials mechanical properties they never had…    read more 

The State of Resin 3D Printing series continues with insights from Jason Rolland, SVP, Materials at Carbon. Rolland was an early hire for the California-based digital manufacturing company and now has over eight years of experience of leadership in the materials division. With a Ph.D. in Chemistry, Rolland has been instrumental in advancing the materials palette available for industrial 3D printing with Carbon systems. Headline-grabbing advances such as the adidas Futurecraft 4D and 4DFWD are made possible with Digital Light Synthesis. Elsewhere Carbon is active in sectors including dental, life sciences and automotive – but as Rolland says, “we have only scratched the surface of what our platform is capable of.” Carbon 3D printers at Fast Radius. Photo via Fast Radius. 3DPI: How have you seen resin-based 3D printing develop in recent years? Jason Rolland: There have been advances in what we call “single-cure” resin technology with companies like Adaptive3D,…    read more 

Markforged, a leading developer of metal and composite 3D printing systems, has announced the launch of a new 3D printing material. Precise PLA is an affordable filament designed specifically for rapid prototyping applications, allowing users to iterate and validate their designs in a low-cost manner. As such, the firm’s materials portfolio now has something for every stage of product development, including Precise PLA for initial concepts and metals and fiber-reinforced composites for high-strength end-use parts. The company will offer its latest material in eight colors: yellow, red, green, blue, orange, black, white, and gray. “An affordable material devoted to design validation was a top request from our customers to deliver a uniform and smooth print on the Digital Forge from the beginning to the end of the product life cycle,” said Shai Terem, President and CEO of Markforged. “The growth and adoption of the Digital Forge depend upon our ability…    read more 

Despite being one of the world’s most-consumed plastics, polypropylene (PP) is yet to be leveraged to its full extent for 3D printing, due to issues surrounding interlayer bonding, warpage, bed adhesion, and inadequate support materials. PP 3D printing materials specialist PPprint is on a mission to change this, though. Having built up a comprehensive materials portfolio dedicated to PP since its founding four years ago, the firm also offers printing services and support to its customers in order to accelerate the use of PP within additive manufacturing. I spoke to Product Manager Sebastian Schmidt about the benefits of PP and its advantages over other polymer materials for FDM 3D printing, as well as the firm’s ambitious plans for growing the adoption of PP 3D printing within highly demanding industries like automotive, tooling, medical technology and others.  “The great thing about PP, and why it is so widely used in injection…    read more