3D printing, also known as additive manufacturing (AM), has revolutionized many industries, and aerospace and defense are among the key sectors leveraging its potential. The unique requirements of these industries—lightweight materials, high precision, complex geometries, and fast prototyping—make 3D printing an ideal solution.
Create fewer, optimized parts while lowering the costs of manufacturing. Using our additive manufacturing and consulting for aerospace and defense enables a single 3D printed component to replace multiple subcomponents. This means consolidating these subcomponents into a monolithic design, which contributes to weight reduction, fewer bolted and welded joints, and improved overall system performance.
Passive RF hardware is a family of parts that conduct an electromagnetic signal. They can guide, filter, modulate or amplify a signal in different stages of a typical communication chain from earth to a satellite and back. Learn more about the drivers to select our technology to design and manufacture these components.
With the constantly growing eVTOL and other electric flying vehicle platforms, it is important to have electric motors and their main components (e.g.: stators, rotors, heat exchangers, etc.) optimized by creating lightweight, highly efficient structures.
Electric Engine Component Application >
Use our advanced direct metal printing to produce lightweight aerospace parts at reduced operational costs that enable greater fuel efficiency. Using topological optimization, you can design highly complex features that maintain or even improve material strength.
Maximize heat transfer and minimize temperature fluctuations by integrating heat-exchanging structures into a single, 3D printed design. Unlike traditional methods, our leading additive manufacturing allows for the production of efficient, high-performance thermal management parts through a streamlined process that reduces time to market.
Skip the expense of injection molding tooling for casting patterns. Our advanced software, hardware, and materials enable you to use investment casting workflows to cast 3D printed molds in a fraction of the time and cost. Aerospace parts manufacturers can move directly from CAD to casting pattern with fewer design limitations and quickly create hollow patterns capable of far greater design complexity.
Accelerate Your Path from Concept to Commercialization
Emirates Airlines and 3D Systems change the supply chain equation with additive manufacturing
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The ability to quickly cast metal parts is essential at all levels of motorsports. 3D Systems has developed innovative casting solutions to allow complex parts to be accurately manufactured with quick turnarounds to get teams on the track as fast as possible.
Maximize the performance of fluid and energy management with 3D Systems AM solutions. You can create strong, corrosive-resistant streamlined metal components that optimize energy, flow, and heat in your propulsion systems. The components produced with our solutions handle high temperatures, harsh conditions, and various fluids – while easily fitting in constrained spaces.
Manufacturing aids like robot grippers, jigs, fixtures, and locators are required to perform reliably in a challenging environment. These items are subjected to forces, wear, and chemicals that stress some additive materials and technologies. Components are often tailored but also modified, stressing traditional tool making and inventory systems. With 3D Systems AM solutions, you can save time, money and labor by tailoring tools to improve the overall assembly process, withstand the working conditions, while allowing operations to optimize replacement kept on hand.
Manufacturing Aids Application >
Create durable tools such as injection mold and die-cast tool inserts that perform in ways unachievable with traditional tool making, and build them in a fraction of the time. Advanced tools with innovations like conformal cooling often necessitate innovative production methods to deliver quality parts at production volume. With the short lead time of 3D-printed durable tooling, you can accelerate the iteration and innovation of these advanced tools.
Optimize the performance of propulsion, drivetrain, and surrounding components through rapid iteration while meeting high-temperature and flame-resistant requirements. 3D Systems AM solutions allow you to produce durable 3D-printed parts quickly, helping you gain a competitive advantage and protect your intellectual property.
Reduce the time it takes to build, test and iterate parts for aerodynamics validation. Having 3D Systems AM equipment on-site allows you to quickly construct and test a variety of highly accurate metal and plastic parts that replicate finished motorsports components. This makes it possible to incorporate feedback immediately and maximize the time allotted for wind tunnel testing.
Optimize your cabin’s physical, functional, and visual experience. Without requiring expensive tooling, 3D Systems AM solutions allow you to create better concept car prototypes. You can make these with realistic texture and surface finishes that can be printed, plated, painted, and wrapped directly. Additionally, you can create innovations such as fastening systems and integrated latching to provide new design methods for manufacturing and service.
3D Systems broad portfolio of durable materials enables you to produce rigid exterior panels for concept car components that don’t deform over large surfaces. This capability allows you to direct air where it’s needed, reduce drag, and untimately maximize aerodynamic performance while maintaining precise control over Class A exterior style. Sensory mounts can also be added, giving you a unique and innovative way to collect additional analytics.
Optimize fluid management to maximize the use of valuable package space. With 3D Systems innovative air and fluid handling solutions, you can produce complex geometries that represent design intent and test them to validate component and system performance. Your parts not only allow for valuable concept evaluation but will also withstand environmental extremes and the pressures and flows while providing the chemical compatibility and stability needed over time.
Understanding how SLS Additive Materials Work for your Business
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Ensure showerhead’s even material deposition and increase reliability by leveraging part consolidation techniques to prevent leakages, novel cooling strategies to extract heat and intricate nozzle shapes for deposition control – all of this in 25% of traditional showerhead production time.
Improve the temperature stability of fast-moving linear stages by optimizing cooling channels and cooling jackets’ walls thickness, down to 0.6mm. Combined with leak-proof consolidated components, this results in improved system long-term reliability and precision.
3D Systems 3D printing solutions enable rapid iteration of high performance prototypes, delivering rapid order fulfillment and faster time-to-market. With a portfolio of materials offering advanced mechanical, thermal, elastomeric, chemical resistance, and biocompatible properties, there is a suitable material for a vast array of wearable component applications.
Wearable Components Application >
Design and manufacture superior-performing manifolds with optimized flow to reduce pressure drop, mechanical disturbances, and vibration. Replace multipart assemblies with monolithic parts for increased reliability, improved manufacturing, and yield.
Consumer technology products can present daunting engineering challenges to quickly deliver excellent quality, fit and finish. 3D printing eliminates tooling costs and lead-times for housings and covers, whether for prototypes or bridge production, with materials that deliver advanced mechanical properties and long-term environmental stability.
Reduce flow turbulences and reliably convey caustic gases designing and producing smaller, more complex, leak-proof gas mixers and feeders with reduced part count. Optimized gas mixers can be developed in far less time to deliver more effective mixing faster and at lower manufacturing cost.
Semiconductor lithography, wafer processing, and test equipment rely on structural parts that move fast while maintaining positional accuracy. Improve kinematic and static performance with structural optimization, lightweighting, and part consolidation of optical assembly flexures and mechanisms. Part courtesy of VDL.
Creating seal and gasket prototypes for testing and end-use validation is critical to ensure perfect fit of your consumer products, and can be time consuming and expensive to produce with conventional methods. For rapid design iteration and prototyping of true silicone components, 3D printing eggshell molds is a fast and cost-effective alternative to injection molding.
Maximize heat transfer efficiency and improve semiconductor capital equipment throughput and accuracy. Optimized cooling channels and surface patterns dramatically improve surface temperatures and thermal gradients (<4mK) while reducing time contants (<1.5s), which enhances system speed and accuracy.
Figure 4® Additive Manufacturing at Nokia in an Industry 4.0 Ecosystem
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Accelerate creativity with accurate, finely detailed, high-fidelity prototypes. Our solutions provide a quick turnaround from digital designs to 3D printed jewelry models, allowing for fast design iteration, validation, stone settings, and try-on.
Reveal your most creative jewelry designs faster and increase productivity without compromising quality. Our solutions for 3D printed jewelry casting patterns fit with your standard process for reliable output every time, bringing you maximum design freedom for high-volume and mass custom jewelry manufacturing.
Leverage 3D Systems solutions developed for compatibility with jewelry mold making processes for high-volume manufacturing. 3D print ultra-high-detail, heat-resistant, high-quality, complex master patterns to create your rubber mold in a matter of hours.
3D Printed Wax Casting Patterns – 3D Systems
See How 3D Systems is Transforming Manufacturing at IMTS 2018
Introducing Figure 4® Jewelry Printing Solution
In over 30 years in healthcare, we have collaborated with manufacturers and surgeons in the orthopaedic and cranio-maxillofacial fields to develop innovative implants and instrumentation, patient-specific surgical plans and devices, anatomic models and more. It is through this ongoing communication with leaders in these specialties that we have amassed knowledge needed to become a trusted resource for designing and producing high quality, reliable solutions.
Medical device manufacturers need innovative ways to bring high-quality, reliable products to market faster. 3DS customers trust their unparalleled capabilities and experience in additive manufacturing to help them develop innovative medical devices and instrumentation. 3DS also collaborate with them to determine the best approach to commercialization, either through contract manufacturing support from our two device manufacturing facilities or via technology transfer to their customer.
3D Systems’ VSP® surgical planning solutions combine best-in-class digital workflows with the industry’s broadest additive manufacturing portfolio of printers and materials to deliver comprehensive patient-matched solutions. We partner with device manufacturers, hospitals, and surgeons to innovate these customer solutions that help translate virtual surgery into the OR, improve surgical outcomes, and elevate the patient experience.
Personalized Healthcare Solutions Application >
3D Systems helps hospitals and providers set up on-site 3D printing capabilities to design, manufacturer and deliver implants and instrumentation right at the point of care. With over 30 years of experience in healthcare, our Application Innovation Group (AIG) provides guidance on technologies and applications to make adoption of 3D technologies easy.
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