Parts printed in Formlabs' Ceramic Resin.
Formlabs has announced the availability of its Ceramic Resin for customers in North America and Europe.
Designed for the Form 2 3D printer, Ceramic Resin is an experimental material born out of Formlabs' FormX platform, first previewed at CES back in 2017, in an effort to make 3D printing with ceramics more accessible on the desktop.
Current ceramic solutions on the market can be prohibitively expensive but the Boston-based company believes its latest offering will enable more engineers and designers to bring rapid iteration with ceramic in-house.
Demand for ceramic 3D printing within internal R&D and fabrication labs at Fortune 500 companies is growing. Major organisations such as NASA have entire teams dedicated to ceramics research, developing materials like Nextel fabric, an advanced ceramic that resists fire penetration, and GRABER, a ceramic-filled adhesive used to repair small cracks in space. The military uses ceramic materials to design lightweight armour while electronic component manufacturers use alumina ceramics for insulators, resistors, and semiconductors due to their high heat and electrical conductivity properties.
Nervous System has spent several months beta testing the new resin.
Ceramic Resin is a silica-filled photopolymer. Parts printed with the resin deliver a stone-like finish before they are fired to burn out the photopolymer and create a fully ceramic piece. Formlabs says the material is a little trickier to work with compared to other standard resins in its portfolio and requires an element of trial and error. For example parts must be scaled beforehand in Formlabs' PreForm software to accommodate for shrinkage during firing.
Generative design studio, Nervous System has been beta testing the resin for several months and this week launched its first ever 3D printed ceramic product "Porifera".
Nervous System has launched a ceramic jewellery range printed using the new resin.
The studio had previously outsourced production for a porcelain housewares line but wanted to merge the complex geometries available with 3D printing with the quality of traditional ceramics for a new jewellery range. While beta testing Formlabs formulations, Nervous System helped steer material development to overcome challenges such like printability issues and final fired part density.
"It's nice to make things in-house," Jesse Louis-Rosenberg, co-founder and chief science officer at Nervous System said. "We don't necessarily want to be tied to a technology. Making a huge investment into a tool is not something that we're interested in but being able to make things on our own and experiment is something we're excited about."
