EnvisionTEC’s Answers to the Tough Questions

Industrial Engineers in Puerto Rico were recently challenged to ask the tough questions before buying a 3D printer for their facility. In this article we provide envisionTECs’ answers to the rough questions as they see it.

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Purchasing on Cost. While Industrial 3D printers are not printers that you want to buy based on cost. envisionTEC manufactures a line of the finest industrial 3D printers on the market at an appropriate price. For example, here is an important item that will contribute to the costs in light projection technology-the projector. envisionTEC uses state-of-the-art Direct Light Projection technology from Texas Instruments® in their Perfactory® printers. The Perfactory® printers are fitted with an industrial projector with square pixels and glass uv optics built specifically for 3D printing. While there are other well known printers on the market, they use low grade projectors originally design for home theaters and retrofitted for their machines. Home theatre projectors in low cost printers are modified by manufacturers to deliver low cost printers that typically only survive around 90 days of daily usage because the projectors were originally designed for visible light not UV light for resin curing.
Resolution and Tolerance. envisionTEC has industrial printers with some of the best resolution on the market. Some envisionTEC’s industrial have resolutions as low as 50 microns. Check the specification sheets for our printers to find a printer to suit your needs or contact your local distributor.
Material Variety and Research. envisionTEC currently provides 47 materials with more on the way. These materials have a variety of physical properties. When looking for an industrial printer look at the material properties that you need first. In addition, envisionTEC has a state-of-the-art research center working on developing more materials with the properties needed in the industrial sector.Here is an overview of the available materials with envisionTEC printers:
Printer Material Diversity. envisionTEC has printers that can build with with different materials such as high temp for rubber molding and wax based for direct casting. envisionTEC has sought to build their printers from the ground up to deliver diversity in material not just within the company but within the printer.
Material Access. This is the most important point for Puerto Rico. envisionTEC’s raw material are manufactured in Canada and as a result have easy access to the United States market. There is never a customs or import issue with their raw materials. The lead time for ordering materials can be as short as two days. The manufacturing plant is well equipped to handle industry demands.
Moving Parts (wear and tear). envisionTEC printers uses Direct Light Projection technology from Texas Instruments® and 3SP® – Scan, Spin and Selectively Photo technology-both of which use a minimum in moving parts. The lack of moving parts used in the building of your project decreases the probability of machine breakdown.
Technology. There are a wealth of rapid prototyping and 3D printing technologies available, almost all of which use lasers or inkjet heads. envisionTEC printers are different.
1. DLP® – Digital Light Processing. The Perfactory® system builds 3D objects from liquid resin using a projector. This is known as Digital Light Processing with our DLP® projectors. Perfactory® is the short form for “Personal Factory” and works like a copy station. It builds solid 3D objects by using a DLP® projector to translate voxel data so it is reproduced in liquid resin, thereby curing the resin to solid. Each data-set is made up of tiny volumetric pixels, with dimensions as small as 16 μm x 16 μm x 15 μm in the X, Y, and Z directions. 3D printing with DLP® technology is like assembling your part from very small building blocks each composed of different volumes.
2. 3SP® – Scan, Spin and Selectively Photocure. A multi-cavity laser diode with an orthogonal mirror spinning at 20,000 rpm reflects the beam through a spinning drum, where the light passes through a series of optical elements thereby focusing the light onto the surface of the photopolymer across the Y direction. The Imaging Light Source (ILS) contains the multi-cavity laser diode, its driver, and all optics. The ILS travels in the X direction at 1-2 inches per second (material dependent) while the laser light scans the Y direction and selectively photo-cures liquid resin based on the data path. This technology is ideal for:
  1. Mass-customization of high-accuracy products
  2. High speed printing at 10 mm per hour for a full envelope, or 20mm in 2 hours for a full envelope at a 50 micron resolution, which still 2X faster than any other system in the market today
  3. Increased productivity in replacing low-cost manually manufactured models
  4. Ability to produce highly accurate parts at a more competitive price point due to speed that still achieves high surface quality and material functionality
3. 3D-Bioplotter® The 3D-Bioplotter® is suited for bioprinting and bioengineering applications due to its specialized ability to extrude multiple materials in three dimensions using pressure. Materials may range from viscous paste to free-flowing liquid, and are inserted using syringes moving in three dimensions. Air or mechanical pressure is applied to the syringe, which then deposits a strand of material according to the length of the movement and the period of time the pressure is applied. Parallel strands are plotted in one layer. For the following layer, the direction of the strands is turned over the center of the object, creating a fine mesh with good mechanical properties and mathematically-defined porosity.
File Format. envisionTEC’s printers can accept any .STL file. All printers come with the Magics software which works with .STL files exclusively for exporting build jobs onto envisionTEC 3D printers. Magics offers a several functions for preparing your files for successful jobs. Magics can check your file for errors with other various functions. STL data is composed of floating point precisions. STLs have what’s known as a point cloud, which is a group of recognized areas of conjunction. Each of the triangular pieces of one file fit together along their faces and bunch together at specific points, all of which in a single job are a cloud. Magics can detect where triangles don’t meet up properly and in cases where the parts of the job file don’t meet up, the user can use the repair function prior to 3D printing to correct these problems.
Service Agreement. envisionTEC provides a one year warranty on all their machines. They also provide extended warranties after the initial warranty period is over. The extended warranty and service contracts are executed through the Puerto Rico distributor. envisionTEC distributors are fully trained on all aspects of machine maintenance, service and repair. Anyone purchasing an industry 3D printer from the envisionTEC’s Puerto Rico distributor Rich Port 3D Solutions can rest assured that they have local access to technological envisionTEC expertise.

envisionTEC Industrial 3D Printers Available through Rich Port 3D Solutions

About the Author

Jenny Carrero,PhD has an extensive technical background. She received her PHD in Biophyisics from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana where she worked with lasers, spectrometers, confocal microscopes etc. She is an authority on 3D printing for industrial and consumer use in Puerto Rico.

Rich Port 3D Solutions is a Puerto Rican owned and operated company headquartered in Añasco, Puerto Rico. We are a 3D printing resource dedicated to helping Puerto Rican businesses compete on the world stage in 3D printing technology by paving the way for the uptake of this technology in Puerto Rico.

envisionTEC printers are only available in Puerto Rico through Rich Port 3D Solutions.