Expanding Material Offerings to Enable More End-use Application Production
Carbon’s mission is to enable companies to make radically better products by designing, developing, and producing on Carbon’s idea-to-production platform. End-use, engineering-grade materials are critical to this mission.
Carbon currently offers a world-class materials portfolio consisting of two tiers that contain both rigid and elastomeric materials designed exclusively for the Carbon platform by our in-house materials development team, as well as validated resins from third-party suppliers like Henkel, Keystone Industries®, Dentsply Sirona, and Desktop Health™. We are now introducing a new tier of third-party resins as Early Access, which expands access to certain third-party materials by running them through a more streamlined validation process.
This tiered approach to material offerings provides Carbon customers with a wide breadth of materials to suit their application and production needs.
The Advantages of Carbon-Developed Resins
The first tier in our materials offering is resins that are developed in-house by Carbon. A cross-functional team of scientists, engineers, and application specialists ensures these resins take full advantage of Carbon’s hardware, software, and materials offerings, and can be delivered with the highest quality and performance. In particular, Carbon’s material portfolio provides a range of dual-cure materials designed to meet demanding real-world needs. The dual-cure resin framework leverages a sophisticated chemistry platform that combines two different curing mechanisms–a light-based process and a secondary thermally-activated cure.
The versatility of Carbon’s dual-cure resins has been instrumental in breaking into new markets that demand innovation and end-use materials. With the ability to produce high energy-return elastomers for footwear and saddles, energy-damping elastomers for helmets, impact-resistant rigid polyurethanes, and thermally durable epoxy resins for automotive and industrial applications, Carbon resins have effectively expanded the horizon of what is achievable through additive manufacturing.
Validated Third-Party Resins Expand Carbon’s Portfolio
There is a growing number of outstanding resins on the market from other suppliers that meet the specific needs of oral health and engineering customers. Carbon collaborates with third-party resin suppliers to validate certain resins and add depth and diversity of materials to the platform. These validated third-party resins comprise the second tier of our material offering.
Carbon has learned a lot from validating our own resins for customers’ production needs, and has developed a rigorous 30+ data point validation process for third-party materials to ensure each material certified for use in the Carbon ecosystem meets the high standards essential for production scenarios.
This commitment to excellence is exemplified through key partnerships across oral health and engineering segments with industry leaders like Keystone Industries, Desktop Health, Dentsply Sirona, and Henkel. As of May 2024, Carbon is proud to offer more than 50 third-party resins (including color shades), that have been validated for the Carbon workflow.
Accelerating Access for Customers with Early Access Resins
To provide our customers with a broader toolbox of resins to enable them to respond quickly to emerging applications, Carbon is introducing a new tier of third-party resins with Early Access enablement for use with Carbon printers. This new third tier accelerates access to third-party resins and features a more streamlined validation process that enables Carbon to bring new resins onto the platform faster.
Resins in the Early Access tier are tested according to the workflow identified by third-party resin suppliers, and while they will have a dropdown in the Carbon print UI, support from Carbon will be limited. Resins in the Early Access category will be included and identified in the Carbon UI with an Early Access tag on the resin software dropdown as well as their designation on the website.
Resins in the Early Access category are candidates for further validation, including workflow testing and print optimization, to become validated third-party resins, depending on customer interest and uptake.
Today, we are launching the Early Access tier with two new resins:
- LOCTITE® 3D MED414 Blue: Medical-grade soft material available with high elongation at break. Suitable for skin contact applications, as per Henkel’s IFU, available in blue.
- LOCTITE® 3D IND3380 Black: High-temperature resistant resin with electrostatic discharge (ESD) capabilities and high stiffness. Suitable for jigs, fixtures, and electronic manufacturing applications.
Conclusion
Materials are crucial elements for the production of end-use applications with additive manufacturing. Carbon-developed resins stand out as innovative, best-in-class materials that meet production needs. The unique combination of speed, precision, and durability offered by the dual-cure approach and Carbon’s Digital Light Synthesis™ (Carbon DLS™) technology has enabled breakthrough applications across many markets. Fully-validated materials from trusted partners expand our material offering even further for customers across oral health and engineering markets. By introducing the Early Access category, we will accelerate the introduction of more third-party resins to our customers and enable them to develop applications even faster.
3D as It’s Meant to Be
Interested in utilizing Carbon to accelerate product development? Reach out to us at sales@carbon3d.com to learn more!