Sinterit
Flexa-Bright-earplug sinterit
An earplug printed in Flexa Bright on the Sinterit Lisa 2 Pro.
Sinterit has announced the launch of a white thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) material for its SLS 3D printing systems a week after unveiling its Flexa Soft product.
The company says it has answered the demands of its customers with Flexa Bright, a functional rubber enabling flexible objects in two levels of hardness and ‘as close to the white colour as is possible’.
It represents the sixth material available to users of the Sinterit Lisa series, after PA12, PA11 Onyx, Flexa Black, Flexa Grey and Flexa Soft, and the company believes will allow its customers to target an array of applications it hasn’t yet been able to.
“We love our grey and black powders, which were a kind of benchtop SLS status quo for so many years now,” commented Konrad Glowacki, company co-founder. “But with this white rubber, we are opening our products for a whole new range of applications, especially in [the] medicine or [the] fashion industry.”
The material boasts an elongation at break of 317% and an ultimate tensile strength of 10MPa according to PN-ISO 37:2007. It is classes as a medium-hard material with a Shore A hardness value of 79 by PN-EN ISO 868:2005 standard, and it has a water absorptions of about 3% according to PN-EN ISO 62:2008.
Sinterit says the material is well suited to meeting flexible prototyping needs, including prototyping fabric, clothes and creating items needed in the medical sector, particularly in pre-surgery and training programmes. Architecture and the luxury industry are two other markets where the company expects the material to be welcomed.
The company will be presenting its new materials along with its SLS additive manufacturing portfolio at Formnext, in Hall 3.1, Booth G41.
