Polymaker and AMESOS, both of which are based in Shanghai, have announced their partnership to co-develop Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) based 3D printing solutions.
Polymaker develops and manufactures a large variety of materials for material-extrusion based 3D printing and their products are widely used by a large spectrum of professional and industrial users.
AMESOS was recently formed as a spin-off of Akribis Systems - a global leader in direct drive motors and motion control technologies formed in 2004 - and despite being a new company, the teams at AMESOS and Akribis have been working on 3D printing for the past five years, with the deep technical capabilities at Akribis allowing them to design 3D printing systems in new ways.
The partnership will help tackle the complexity that FFF based 3D printing usually causes. FFF printings speed can often be considered slow, which can cause major barriers when using the technology, especially in series production applications, and despite the industry's acceleration, progress in improving the printing speed has been limited.
Tommy Huang, the Co-Founder of AMESOS, said: “We started by trying to solve the problem alone, but very soon we realised that we are only part of the solution and desperately need many other areas of expertise.”
Dr. Xiaofan Luo, President of Polymaker, added: “The process complexity of FFF 3D printing is orders of magnitude higher than traditional polymer processing technologies, and therefore to really tackle this problem we need some major paradigm shift in the R&D process.”
The key reason for the lack of progress with improving the technology is that it requires multiple domains of technical expertise working together, but with AMESOS and Polymaker’s partnership, the companies believe the issue could soon have a solution called ‘FFF 2.0’.
Dr Xiaofan added: “We will take a process-centric and bottom-up approach, and we will start with studying and defining the process, which then guides the printer design and material development, not the other way around, and this is very different from how R&D is done today in many printer and material companies.”
To help tackle the process complexity, Polymaker will also bring in Helio Additive - a startup company which Polymaker helped co-found - that is developing a unique software solution which combines physics-based simulation and data science to guide the development and optimisation of printing processes. This software tool will be a vital to the success of the partnership.
AMESOS are also introducing a new 3D printing system called the Blade 1 system to the market later this year which it says has shown over 60% reduction in printing times over existing FFF printers so far with no compromise in the overall printing quality. Pairing this with the custom developed material by Polymaker, the mechanical properties are said to be on par or better than on high-speed printing.
Tommy added: “We have already seen some promising preliminary results that have proved the viability and effectiveness of our partnership model and what we want is to achieve consistent high-speed printing without sacrificing part quality or properties.”
Dr Xiaofan said: “AMESOS and Polymaker have a shared vision about the future of FFF in series production and we are still in the beginning. There is huge, untapped potential to be explored.”
AMESOS and Polymaker are currently working on a multi-year technical roadmap and their end goal is to make FFF-based 3D printing a 'competitive, widely adopted production technology.'
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