Product category:
Fast prototyping equipment, pattern-making and services
News Release from: EOS Electro Optical Systems | Subject: Direct Metal Laser-Sintering products
Edited by the Manufacturingtalk Editorial
Team on 12 November 2003
Products produced directly from
electronic data
'e-Manufacturing' describes the fast, flexible and economical production of products, moulds/tooling or patterns for all phases of the product life cycle, directly from electronic data.
'e-Manufacturing' describes the fast, flexible and economical production of products, moulds/tooling or patterns for all phases of the product life cycle, directly from electronic data Laser-sintering, offering benefits such as freedom of design and functional integration, is increasingly establishing itself as the key technology for e-Manufacturing
This article was originally published on Manufacturingtalk on 12 Oct 2001 at 8.00am (UK)
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Laser-sintering saves time and money for prototyping during product development, but can now also be used in production too. EOS will show how at the K 2001 show in Duesseldorf, Germany.
Laser sinter systems meet Formula One pressures
Two laser sintering systems - including a double-laser one - manufacture hour by hour racing car components directly from thermoplastic powders on the basis of three-dimensional CAD data.
At Euromold EOS, the world-leading manufacturer of laser-sintering systems, is presenting a number of new products and their applications with reference to practical examples.
Eosint M - Direct Metal Laser-Sintering (DMLS) continues to expand into more application areas, and EOS will be presenting a number of new products to support these trends as well as exhibiting examples to demonstrate the state of the art.
In the tooling area (DirectTool), two key trends have been observed recently: rapid tooling is getting more rapid, and ever larger series quantities are being produced in laser-sintered production tooling.
Further reading
Laser sintering expertise brought to the UK
German rapid prototyping systems maker is bringing a wealth of rapid manufacturing technology and experience based on laser-sintering machines and metals, plastics and sands powders.
Laser very fine grain metal powders to make moulds
TransCAT took only 16h using very fine-grained metal powders in a laser-sintering system to build the core and cavity of a plastics injection mould for producing thin-walled fan wheels.
Laser sintering offers flexible plastics parts
Recent developments in laser sintering of plastics and metallic parts include flexible, thin-wall plastics products and a plastics injection mould made from layers of 20 micron steel powder.
EOS recently introduced parameter sets for laser-sintering their "20 æm powders" in layer thicknesses of 40 micron and 60 micron, thereby enabling considerable savings in building time.
In combination with novel and optimized tooling concepts, DirectTool offers the possibility to produce moulded parts in series quality in a very short time.
In one example, the company Kern produced tooling for a series of extremely complex magnesium parts in just four weeks, while in another example Rapid Product Innovations took only 15 hours to go from design to injection-moulded pieces.
Looking at series production, the Belgian toolmaker QuickTools has completed a series of impressive projects for various customers.
In one recent case, more than 700,000 lightweight pulley housings for a high speed loom were injection moulded using laser-sintered tool inserts built with DirectSteel 20 material.
EOS is now presenting a new material which will have even superior performance for this application: DirectSteel H20 is a tool steel material which can be used to build tool inserts with tensile strength of over 1000MPa, a density of nearly 100 % and hardness of over 40 HRc, which will further extend the limits.
The other main application area of DMLS is DirectPart, the building of positive parts.
Rapid Product Innovations has done several projects where batches of up to several hundred metal parts have been built for their customers with very short delivery times and at low cost.
Also here EOS is presenting new developments for increased customer benefit: an advanced support generator enables the quick and easy creation of support structures which are easy to remove from the part.
This means that more complicated geometries can be built, and post-processing is reduced to a minimum.
Eosint P - in the field of direct laser-sintering of plastic parts, a tremendous growth of series production is developing.
The Italian consortium directed by Treviso Tecnologia produced a series of designer glasses of the Crabbi brand via direct laser-sintering.
After a special surface finishing the glasses received the official CE sign and were then marketed as a limited edition product.
Also within the Eosint P product line, several new products are being presented to increase both the product quality and the productivity, in both cases making the technology even better suited for series production.
A new aluminium-filled polyamide material Alumide promises smoother surfaces, even better finishing properties and excellent accuracy in the direct manufacture of plastic parts.
A new process software for all Eosint P systems, whether they have one or two lasers, speeds up the building processes.
Especially for the double laser system Eosint P 700, EOS presents upgrade packages which lead to further improvements in detail resolution and productivity.
Higher functionality in data processing - in addition to the above mentioned news for increase of suitability for series production, EOS presents a new generation of its innovative data processing software EOSPACE for automated surface-oriented placing for optimum use of capacity.
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