Titanium 3D printed with e-Stage for metal support.
WINNER of the TCT Software Award 2018. Submit your design-to-manufacturing innovation for this year’s TCT Awards here.
Creating supports for metal 3D printed parts is an essential but tricky process. When building complex geometries, making sure parts are both anchored sufficiently and easy to remove can be extremely time consuming. Belgian 3D printing leader, Materialise has been tackling the pains of support generation for the last decade with its e-Stage software for stereolithography and DLP technologies and at formnext powered by tct the company announced it is now expanding those capabilities to the metals market.
Materialise is the first company to offer a fully automatic software product for the generation of optimal support structures for SLM (selective laser melting) parts in titanium, aluminium and stainless steel. With e-stage for Metal, it claims to have a solution that will reduce significant amounts of time in support generation and also drive down costs.
The software has been in development for two years following the success of its e-Stage polymer offering and was officially launched onto the market last week. Materialise e-Stage for Metal delivers significant time savings compared to manual support generation, including support design, support removal by up to 50% and part finishing up to 20% faster. In addition, thanks to its diamond-shape structure, nearly all of the expensive metal powder trapped in the supports can now be recovered which means powder consumption levels are much lower and health risks are minimised. The automated process also limits the risk of human error and related build crashes.
Ingo Uckelmann, Technical Manager of Metal 3D Printing, at Materialise Bremen explains: “The time savings delivered by the automated generation of metal supports enables engineers to focus on other tasks. The elimination of manual work makes the process much more reliable and efficient, which allows us to meet increased customer demands."
e-Stage for Metal software.
Materialise has been using the software internally for some time and has already been working with several beta customers throughout this year to gather feedback. One of those customers is Airbus APWorks which has been printing and testing aerospace parts created with e-Stage for Metal.
“Using e-Stage supports for Metal AM brings good improvements compared to traditional supporting methods," the company commented. "We, at AIRBUS APWORKS GmbH, are convinced about the e-Stage potential to reduce powder consumption, reduce post-processing time, increase build job speed while still guaranteeing a high build stability. This is an important step towards reduced printing costs."
Speaking with Koen Neutjens, Product Manager, Materialise e-Stage during a tour of the Materialise booth, he added: “There was of course a little bit of hesitation at first. But once they tested it on a challenging part and they saw that it succeeded, it shifted from hesitation to excitement and they really wanted to test more and put it in their production environment.”
Koen explained how in some cases, support generation time was reduced from around 90 minutes to a matter of seconds, exemplified in a case study from Volum-e who used the software to reduce support generation time by 80% and halve support removal time for a metal 3D printed drone.
Volum-e 3D printed drone with e-Stage supports.
Building on Materialise's presence as the "backbone of the 3D printing industry" and expanding its software capabilities even further, last week Materialise also announced an agreement with Simufact Engineering GmbH, a metal AM process simulation software company, to give Materialise Magics users better control of their pre-build processes. The combination of Simufact’s simulation expertise with Materialise’s full process AM expertise results in a straightforward workflow for Magics users who want to apply simulation within their process. Materialise is already looking at ways in which this simulation tool could be incorporated into e-Stage in the near future to make it even easier for users to create optimised parts.
“There is still a learning curve in the sense that you can use the software to generate supports but with some parts, particularly bigger parts with big cross sections, we may still need to add some additional supports to anchor the part or extract heat," Koen explained. "We also have the Simufact deal and the first thing that we want to do with this software is to apply it to e-Stage to make it smarter.”
The original e-Stage is still receiving regular updates, some of which we saw at TCT Show earlier this year in Materialise e-Stage 7.0 which offers SLA support that decreases the build time and resin consumption up to 50%. With additional tools such automation and simulation, the necessary but often neglected pre- and post-printing parts of the AM process are gradually becoming more streamlined, more intelligent and ultimately much simpler.
