Cubicure, an Austrian 3D printing business, has expanded its machine line with the acquisition of a large-scale Cerion 3D printer,
which provides industrial customers with a critical component for fully digitizing their supply chains.
It has opened a Cerion manufacturing facility to cover the entire digital manufacturing process, from prototyping to industrial series production.
Cubicure has been developing Cerion for a few years and it is already in use with pilot customers.
Industrial serial printing of polymer parts needs a fundamental break from lithographic additive manufacturing techniques like resin baths or material vats.
Cubicure instead proposes a new printing process with the Cerion 3D printer,
which has a mobile printing head and a spinning resin carrier film.
The printing approach for the large-scale system is scalable in terms of physical dimensions and
entails a whole new knowledge of lithographic 3D printing throughput and production quality.
Cerion 3D printer
The Cerion 3D printer can create a few large pieces or hundreds of little parts of the same excellent quality.
Polymer pieces are produced with extraordinary reproducibility
and optical accuracy of 50 x 50 m2 on a platform of one meter by 30 centimetres.
“There is no variance in manufacturing accuracy dispersed over the build area due to the type of processing with a traversing printing head and exceptionally fine exposure control,”
affirms Dr Bernhard Busetti,
Cubicure’s process engineer and product manager for AM systems.
Cerion also uses Cubicure’s tried-and-true Hot Lithography technology. As a result, the new system has immediate access to a wide process window and a diverse set of photopolymers.
“This is a watershed moment in the industrialization of lithographic printing techniques.”
Both the material intake and the detachment of printed polymer layers from the carrier film are scalable in this printing process.
Many aspects of the construction process,
such as process forces,
are now separated from part geometry
and the occupancy of the building platform.
The printing platform’s width and length no longer have an impact on process performance.
After three decades of stereolithography, a commercially viable technique has finally been discovered.”
— Cubicure’s Managing Director and Chief Technology Officer, Dr Robert Gmeiner
Nothing now stands in the way of mass-producing high-performance polymers; the next step ushers in a new era of toolless manufacturing.
At the just-completed Formnext 2021 trade event, Cubicure’s Cerion 3D printer was also on display.
