TCT
EPU Pro sample parts
Carbon has announced the addition of EPU Pro to its 3D printing materials portfolio at Formnext.
The Silicon Valley additive manufacturing company says the new elastomer family delivers the benefits of its proprietary dual-cure resins in a single container and provides the same high-performance while improving usability for production.
Described as a material ‘platform’, customers can use the resin alongside the Carbon Design Engine to determine the performance, protection, and comfort of their product using multizonal lattices. The EPU Pro platform can also incorporate foaming agents to introduce haptics, creating a suede-like touch and can enable greater design freedoms for curvatures and delicate features.
Jason Rolland, SVP of Materials at Carbon said, "The EPU Pro platform offers mechanical properties and novel haptics that are suitable for a wide variety of high-performance applications, custom colours, and tuneable material stiffnesses. This allows us to continue to push the boundaries of what's possible with our brand partners."
Applications are the focus this week at Carbon's formnext booth, which features a wall adorned with various 3D printed consumer-facing products that have each leveraged Carbon's technologies, such as the famous adidas midsole that started it all to the Fizik customised bike saddle, which features in the latest issue of TCT Magazine.
Speaking to TCT on the show floor, where Carbon showed a range of rigid to flexible to foam versions of the new EPU Pro platform, Carbon CEO Phil DeSimone explained of the single-part container, “Dual cure is amazing, but one of the challenges is it's a two-part system. So you're mixing two ingredients together into the bowl and then you do the print. That resin has a pot life so you have about 8 to 12 hours to print your part or a series of parts, and then you need to wash it out and start over again. So you have to think about that when you're going through the process, and it adds complexity. We figured out how to get the same mechanical properties that we have in a dual cure system, but in a one-part container. And it has a bunch of advantages. It allows us a much wider range of capabilities, essentially out of the same [material] platform you get multiple different 'feels'."
