SOLIDWORKS World is a user community event that brings together 5,000 or so designers and engineers every year. It is becoming something of a hot-bed for the AM/RP/3D printing crowd: Stratasys unveiled full-colour there (and this year unveiled the F123 series) and Markforged premiered the Mark one. The attendees are all users of SOLIDWORKS CAD software and are naturally interested in what innovations lie in store once the CAD work is completed. This year’s event, held at the LA Convention Centre, saw numerous 3D printing companies on the exhibition floor (or, in SWW parlance, the Partner Pavillion) and presenting in the dozens of conference tracks across the three-day event.
One of those companies, Rize, took advantage of the captive audience and large press contingent to show for the first time its Rize One 3D printer ‘in the flesh’. So I dutifully dropped by the booth for a poke around.
Never judge a book by its cover
Rize
Rize One 3D Printer
The Rize One 3D printer uses both extrusion and inkjet processes in tandem to create unique results
Now, in my opinion, the Rize One is not much to look at. It’s quite big but not huge (it’s certainly ‘desktop’ if you’re blessed with a sturdy desk that doesn’t house anything else), mostly cuboid with little in the way of superfluous design flourishes, and is the colour that desktop 2D printers used to be — before someone mandated that they must all be shiny and black — with some on-brand purple accents. It’s by no means ugly, but it’s also unremarkable. It is in essence perfectly neutral.
So on the outside no glitz and gimmicks, just a serious, sturdy looking system that could be dropped into any office without ruffling any feathers. With Rize’s target buyer being located in design engineering offices, this is certainly a plus point for the system. The large colour touchscreen is intuitive and makes process management that much easier.
On the inside, things get much more interesting. I was invited by Rize CEO Frank Marangell to stick my hand into the build chamber and start pushing and pulling at the various components. Everything felt solid and well-constructed and smacks of a system designed with long-term reliable use in mind, with quality components across the board. But what do all those bits do? Let’s re-cap how the Rize One works.
Squeeze and spray
Like any number of systems available today, the most immediate piece of the puzzle is the single extrusion head, familiar to anyone that’s not been living in a cave since the mid-90s. The head is fed by a single filament of proprietary plastic material ($99/kg) — the reasons for this decidedly closed ecosystem start to become clear once you start looking around inside. Nestled behind the extruder head is a second print head, this time of the inkjet variety. If you’ve ever seen inside a desktop inkjet printer (beige or black) you’ll recognise it instantly.
The two methods work in tandem to deliver more than the sum of their parts in what Rize have dubbed Augmented Polymer Deposition (APD) — every good tech needs an acronym, it's 3D printing law. The addition of the ink jetting system opens up huge possibilities for what is in reality the simplest 3D printing technology on the market. Single material extrusion has all sorts of limitations, but the absolute productivity killer is that same-material supports are tricky to remove at best, impossible at worst.
Please release me, let me go
Jon Chomitz
Support removal on Rize One part
In this first iteration of Rize’s hybrid tech, the extruder-inkjet combo work together to overcome this problem of supports to produce one of the lowest effort post-processing workflows I have seen. Where model and support meet the Rize One inkjet deposits a solution, which Rize calls Release One, between the two faces. This solution is engineered to work specifically with the proprietary build material and provides just enough adhesion between layers to ensure effective supports, but not so much that the support and part become one.
Frank explained: “To get the best results, the filament and inkjet material must be developed in tandem. The properties each must have are dependent on the properties of the other, so concurrent development is the only solution. For Release One this means we get enough adhesion between faces, but never too much. It's complex materials science that allows the user the simplest experience possible.”
The test part provided at the booth consisted of a reasonably simple geometry with part-material base and supports for overhangs, which I was instructed to remove. It really is easy and is actually oddly therapeutic. Think popping bubble wrap. The supports don’t fall off, you need a decent pressure to shift them, but when they come away the ‘break’ is clean and accompanied by a pleasing ‘pop’, the surfaces are smooth and the part geometry is true. For anyone that has lost chunks of flesh in the removal of a ABS-on-ABS support this act may well raise a smile. And because there are no water baths and chemical solvents to deal with, your desk remains uncluttered and your health and safety rep undisturbed.
The writing’s in the wall
Jon Chomitz
Text labels applied as part of the Rize One 3D print
The test part also had a second invaluable feature that is enabled by the hybrid approach. A part number was clearly printed on the side of the part in blue ink. Well, actually that’s not true – the part number is printed IN the part; in between the extruded layers. This means it’s there for good. It won’t rub away or wash off as parts are handled, it’s an indelible feature of the part straight off the machine. If you’re running off dozens of iterations of a part for analysis and need to track them through, this alone could save you time, energy and sanity! No longer will an over-eager intern ‘take a look at’ your part and put it back in the wrong place. OK, they will, but at least you’ll know for sure that they did.
Here the inkjet system deposits the ink as the part prints and can create images, shading, text and numerical tags… anything, really, as the part is built. The user can determine how deep inkjetting process goes, for example it could be just 0.5mm in to the part or run all the way through it.
For the time being, the printing is monochrome and blue is the colour. Look a little closer at the innards of the Rize One however and you’ll see a trick familiar to anyone that bought from Objet (a company that formerly employed a proportion of the Rize team); there’s too much kit in there. There are more inkjet heads than you need for monochrome ink and Release One and too many loading bays for inkjet-able material. In fact there are not two but six possibilities for simultaneous jetting. Essentially the Rize One is future-proofed for the next round of developments. What might these be?
Frank came clean: “The current system is ready to use and offers huge improvements over current single process extruding systems, both in part quality, post-processing and colour printing. We are working on the next updates to the system which may include part smoothing [where the inkjet material would ‘blend’ the layers of build material in process]; CMYK colour [hence the extra heads and bays]; or even one day manipulating the filament materials characteristics across the part, for example in terms of hardness or transparency.”
Jon Chomitz
Monochrome image printed as part of a Rize One 3D print
The first updates — CMYK colour — are expected to be shown for the first time at TCT Show in Birmingham this September, and we may even see in-process part smoothing to boot. As ever, we’ll be there to check them out – and so can you www.tctshow.com
