ALTANA, dp polar Highlight Cubic Ink Materials for Industrial 3D Inkjet Printing

At formnext, the leading international trade fair for additive manufacturing, ALTANA and 3D printer manufacturer dp polar will present three new Cubic Ink 3D printing material families, among other things, a High Performance family with unprecedented heat resistance and multi-material capability.

For the first time, a wide variety of materials, including engineering-grade materials with different properties and the support material can be printed in a continuous process. This multi-material ca-pability increases productivity, reduces unit costs, and creates more flexibility in the industrial pro-duction of 3D printed objects.
    
“With Cubic Ink we are setting new standards in additive manufacturing and, for the first time, opening up to industrial users an efficient and sustainable perspective for the series production of highly resilient components,” says Dr. Petra Severit, CTO of ALTANA AG.

“As a result, customers benefit directly from our core competence and decades of experience in the development of innovative resilient high-performance materials. After all, only with high-performance, application-specific materials can the technical potential of a disruptive technology like 3D printing be truly exploited.”

The three Cubic Ink print material families are:
• High-Performance
1-series: Excellent strength and heat resistance up to 193 °C, ideal for applications with hot liquids such as in the engine compartment;
4-series: Good balance between heat deflection temperature of 100 °C and toughness with an elon-gation at break of up to 6% for maximum design freedom.

• Prototyping
Three types of material:

“Tough/Rigid” with very good dimensional stability for robust applications;
“Flexible” with variable degrees of hardness, adjustable elasticity, and high sharpness of detail for flexible or stretchable component parts;
“Clear” for optical components – high transparency and individually adaptable due to a variable refractive index.

• Support Materials
“Standard” and “Fast-dissolving” support materials. These are water-soluble, environmentally friendly, and can be removed automatically in a water bath without chemical solvents.

With Cubic Ink, ALTANA is expanding the range of applications for solutions in the highly inno-vative field of 3D printing. ALTANA AG recently expanded its portfolio of 3D printing materials by acquiring the business of TLS Technik GmbH & Co Spezialpulver KG and the British company Aluminium Materials Technologies Ltd. (AMT).

In the hardware segment, ALTANA had already acquired a stake in dp polar in 2017 and has since been working closely with the technology company based in Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen near Karlsruhe.

dp polar is the manufacturer of the Inkjet AMpolary machine generation, the world’s first 3D print-ing system with a continuously rotating print platform. Unlike previous processes, it is not the print head that moves, but the platform on which the print is made. At this year’s formnext, the company is presenting the AMpolar i1, a new, more compact model with a build volume of up to 240 liters and a print platform of almost one square meter.