At TCT 3Sixty last week, Formlabs teased 'something big' was coming. Today, the 3D printing company has unveiled that something to be the Fuse X1, a larger selective laser sintering (SLS) system that promises to make high-throughput additive manufacturing (AM) more accessible.
The Fuse X1 is available from $84,999 and is said to deliver up to 50% lower cost per part and 3 x the throughput of comparable industrial powder bed fusion systems.
With a sizeable build volume of 330 × 330 × 565 mm, and 30%+ packing density, the machine continues the compact and accessible ethos of Formlabs' original Fuse 1 system by fitting through a standard door and taking up half the floor space of legacy industrial SLS systems. Formlabs says it takes one-hour to install and five-minutes to change a print.
The full Fuse X1 ecosystem includes the Fuse X1 printer and modular Build Unit, Fuse Sift X1 for powder recovery, Fuse X1 Vacuum Conveyor for automated powder transport, and a new high-capacity configuration for Fuse Blast for media blasting and polishing.
The company says more than 30,000 parts have already been printed on the Fuse X1 in the last four months by early access customers including Tesla, Radio Flyer, and Autotiv Manufacturing.
“Since the beginning, Formlabs has worked to build the tools that make it possible for anyone to bring their ideas to life,” said Max Lobovsky, co-founder and CEO of Formlabs. “With Fuse X1, we’re bringing industrial-scale SLS printing to a much broader market, making it competitive with traditional mass manufacturing. Customers no longer need to spend half a million dollars or dedicate an entire facility to manufacturing production-grade parts quickly and reliably.”
In addition to new hardware, Formlabs is also introducing Adaptive Thermal Control, a new thermal architecture that's designed to maintain stable print conditions across the build chamber. It collects and processes 700 times more thermal data per second than the Fuse 1+ 30W, driving 13 independent thermal zones that deliver, maintain, and sinter powder at a precise and stable temperature. It is also launching Print Intelligence, an AI-powered failure prevention system that uses computer vision to monitor every layer with real-time thermal imaging to detect anomalies, and selectively remove affected part from the following layers.
Formlabs is also opening a new online 3D printing service today, Form Now, where customers in the U.S. can order Fuse X1 parts.
