XJet's dream closer to reality as dozens of Carmel machines sold at formnext

XJet had sold around 40 units of its Carmel family of printers - a rate of 1.5 an hour - after three days.

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By day three of formnext powered by TCT 2017, Israeli 3D printing innovator, XJet had pushed out a press release celebrating the meeting of its pre-determined sales targets of its new Carmel family of machines. On the fourth and final day, Dror Danai, the company’s Chief Business Officer, told TCT the target was a few dozen commitments to purchase. Founder and CEO, Hanan Gothait then revealed he wanted a minimum of one machine sold every hour, and up until that point – 11.30am Friday 17th November –  the team in Frankfurt had achieved a rate of 1.5 sales per 60 minutes, equating to around 40 units.

At the official press conference of the launch, Youngstown Business Incubator (YBI) was named as the first USA-based customer, while Andreas Berkau of Oerlikon also explained why the Swiss company had sought to acquire a Carmel 1400 platform the week prior to formnext.

The past month has gone as well as it could have for XJet, the company powered by the brains behind the Idanit 2D printing business acquired by Scitex Corporation in 1998 (and now under the control of HP) and the Objet 3D printing business acquired by Stratasys in 2012. NanoParticle Jetting began to be introduced to the additive manufacturing market at international trade shows last year, and is representative of Gothait’s ambitions, always seemingly symmetrical to those of the industry. ObJet was founded to ‘develop a machine that would do prototypes made of plastic’ back in 1998. Nearly 20 years later, XJet is commercialising a technology that will make Gothait’s latest dream – a 3D printing volume manufacturing solution – a reality.

“We were an excellent team [at ObJet],” Gothait said at the company’s press conference at formnext. “With a merger with Stratasys, today this company is the largest company in the world for prototyping plastics. I am, of course, really proud of that company. I was lucky to take with me excellent people, hand pick them one by one, including my good friend, Dror, and our dream this time in XJet was to do a 3D printer, but not for prototyping, for production. The production of ceramics and metal parts.”

The aspiration is shared by industry players far and wide. XJet, though, has a different idea to the rest in how to achieve it. The NanoParticle Jetting technology at the fore of its drive to make volume manufacturing with 3D printing possible is cited as the impetus for a team of people who have been there, done that when it comes to growing start-ups into industry leaders.

“You need to understand that the people here are on their second or third time in a start-up and we need to motivate a team like that, the best people in the country, some of them the best in the world, you need to create a big dream,” Danai told TCT on the final day of formnext. “The big dream when you do jetting when you move into additive manufacturing is to do multiple materials.”

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So far, the company has developed a process which enables metal and ceramics to be deposited in a liquid form, jetted from inkjet nozzles, thanks to nano-sized particles suspended within a patented liquid formula, which also eliminates the need for lasers. The material is packaged in specially adapted cartridges, safe to load by hand. With each pass of the print head, a fine layer of metal or ceramic liquid droplets are deposited, as is a support material where needed, and the part builds up as the tray descends. The build and support materials are jetted from over 12,000 nozzles simultaneously. Temperatures of up to 300°C cause the ‘liquid jacket’ around the nanoparticles to evaporate, which in turn sees the stochastic particles achieve ‘virtually the same metallurgy (when metal is being printed) and density’ as traditionally made parts. Support materials are said to be easily dissolvable after the print, while the built part will be sintered.  

The 12,000+ nozzles and 24 inkjet heads – 12 for build material and 12 for support – allows XJet’s Carmel platform to deliver the high productivity the company has strived for. It is also said to deliver very good surface quality and very fine detail. Because XJet don’t use powders, their engineers have been able to print layers of around 5-6 microns thick, while maintaining a good speed, and only use as much material as is required. On average, Danai says their particles are around 100x times smaller in diameter when compared to other industrial players’ – a size difference comparable to that of the sun and the earth. The result, according to XJet, are parts that, if you were to inspect them under a microscope, would look no different to parts made with milling. It allows users to achieve near net shape, so when parts are taken out of the printer they don’t require finishing.

“The parts speak for themselves,” Danai said. “The quality is a totally different level and with this quality we can combine every point in a different quality, a different metal, a different ceramic. We’re talking about a very long dream. But you can’t get to the dream without building the blocks. We’ve built the blocks. One block was jetting the material, okay we made simple parts; now we work on supports, so now we jet two materials; then we created the support removal system, which is fine compared to everybody else – it’s no work at all; now, the endorsements we’ve got in the last few days with the installation, we will start to [plot] the projects for the future and that’s at least two years if we’re lucky.”

Next on the company’s agenda is the ability to print multiple build materials at once: ‘the X Factor of AM.’ When Danai linked up once again with Gothait, like they did at originally at ObJet, it was on the basis that there was a bigger dream to go after. XJet has set 2020 as a realistic goal to roll out the next capability, an extension of its already-existing ability to print build and support at the same time. Danai floated the idea of printing a ‘zirconia part here and a metal part there’ on the same build tray at the same time, or perhaps a mixture of stainless steel with zirconia in the same part.

While multiple build materials, used in single and multiple parts alike, are still a few years off, XJet is proud of its machines’ capability to print ‘many, many parts at the same time, and make them fast.’ The Carmel 1400 boasts a build tray of 500x280mm with a height of 200mm, and though that can see users build parts of a decent size, XJet are keen to promote the idea of volume manufacturing smaller components: “Doing one big part that is taking there days is nice but it’s hard to call that manufacturing,” Gothait said. “But if you put 50, 60, 200 parts on the tray and you print them at once, this is closer to manufacturing.”

It’s where XJet wants to really make its mark. Confident in the NanoParticle Jetting process, and also the potential to scale the Carmel platform up and down depending on the size of parts being manufactured, XJet is excited to see what applications come out of it. Though Haim Levi and Avi Cohen have recently been appointed to positions as VP of Manufacturing & Defence and VP of Healthcare & Education, respectively - perhaps a nod to potential vertical markets being targeted - Danai makes the point that the applications of the technology can't actually be influenced by XJet.

Oerlikon’s citim division, as a service bureau, will be one of many companies implementing the Carmel system to apply the NanoParticle Jetting. 

Speaking at the XJet press conference at formnext, Andreas Berkau spoke of his fascination of the NanoParticle Jetting process: “It’s a brand new way of producing parts out of ceramics and out of metal. It’s different from existing technologies, different from powder bed technologies. The basic idea to use liquid and ink to print parts, it sounds very simple, but it opens the door to new applications. We have the chance to print support structure and material at the same time. That allows you to create new parts, to apply a new design to new parts. You can print very fine layers, we have very good surface quality, a very fine detail, and instead of having a powder, which brings a lot of problems to a machine, you can use ink which is safe. It’s a good environment, and it brings us to the next step of industrialisation of additive manufacturing, which is the most important [thing] for us.”

It’s also the most important thing for XJet. Gothait and Danai were pivotal in ObJet’s growth to become a leading 3D printing manufacturer before its merger with Stratasys, who has continued to expand the ObJet range, harnessing the PolyJet technology for production solutions as well as prototyping ones. In the meantime, the original drivers of the ObJet brand have reinvested their money, time and effort to develop a process that has been ten years in the making. Having commercialised it this autumn at formnext powered by TCT, Gothait, Danai and co are ready to drive additive manufacturing’s industrialisation. With more developments to come, there is an obvious anticipation.

“This whole company is a hobby,” Danai says. “It’s a dream to change the world, to really create, to manufacture in an additive way, rather than talking about prototypes or desktop solutions. This is a dream. We’ve already proven with ObJet, we sold it for a billion and a half [dollars]. Now we are in a different story. We’ve done the business, now we have the money, we needed to have the dreams.

“Hopefully it will materialise, [but] this is not the final movie.”