International material sciences leader SABIC has announced its commitment to developing innovation in additive manufacturing at NPE2015.
Local Motors
The world's first 3D printed car, developed with SABIC material technology, manufactured by Local Motors.
Leveraging its global technology centers in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Saudi Arabia, SABIC is expanding its application development focus in additive manufacturing technology.
The move further underscores SABIC's commitment to this evolving technology that is pushing the industry to rapidly develop new materials and processes that can help to achieve improved performance, complex designs, enhanced aesthetics and more economical part builds. SABIC’s capabilities and experience in additive manufacturing across a number of industries will enable it to work closely with technology innovators including universities, research laboratories, printer manufacturers, OEMs and emerging technology companies to help accelerate the advancements necessary for additive manufacturing to reach its full potential.
“The insights and technology developments coming from SABIC will deepen the understanding of the critical link between materials, design, processing and part performance needed to expand the technology from functional prototyping to real-world part production,” said Ernesto Occhiello, Executive Vice-President, Technology & Innovation at SABIC.
“Continuing to invest in capabilities and equipment to support the development of high performance materials for existing additive manufacturing processes as well as new, emerging technologies is a key enabler of SABIC’s strategy to help our customers address their constant challenge of lowering the cost to innovate and bring their designs to market more quickly.”
SABIC’s success with additive manufacturing has been driven in large part by the company’s holistic approach to this technology. From a broad portfolio of high performance materials, to design and processing expertise, to state-of-the-art equipment, SABIC provides a highly supportive research environment for material optimization, testing and designing for additive manufacturing processes. SABIC’s investment in several industrial and desktop printers, including the Big Area Additive Manufacturing (BAAM) printer used to print the world’s first 3D-printed car, will help to facilitate process improvements in fused deposition modelling (FDM®) and other extrusion-based printing processes.
Proven capabilities from prototyping to improved materials, processes and design using additive manufacturing
Utilising state-of-the-art thermoplastics processing technologies as part of the application development process has always been a significant means for SABIC to help solve its customers’ toughest problems. Part teardown, concept creation, mechanical design, CAE analysis, material evaluation, part performance simulation, testing and advanced processing techniques are capabilities already in use at SABIC’s technology centers to serve multiple industries. In a recent project to search for innovation and efficiencies in luminaire design and production, SABIC used predictive engineering and 3D printing technology to create an integrated thermoplastic
LED luminaire, highlighting the opportunity to reduce the number of parts by 84 per cent, the total weight by 24 per cent and assembly time by 65 per cent, compared to a conventional metal luminaire. SABIC was the enabler to help transform an insightful idea into a potential cost competitive solution for the fast growing LED industry.
While at NPE2015, SABIC will be offering a technical seminar focused on the potential of additive manufacturing technologies for the injection moulding industry and the new space it provides for innovative thinking in plastic application development and the related tooling. The seminar will demonstrate how 3D printed metal tools for cavities and cores with conformal cooling designs have been utilized to achieve better efficiencies and improved cycle times. Additionally, SABIC will be giving two presentations at the NPE3D conference track of the SPI Business of Plastics Conference.
