Report from the production exhibition IMTS 2016 (USA)

Hello everyone, Vasily Kiselev with you, the founder and director of Top 3D Shop, who just returned from the States, where from September 12 to 17 the insane in scale and probably the largest international industrial exhibition IMTS 2016 took place .

The exhibition featured truly advanced technologies for the processing of metals, plastics and other materials, and, of course, additive technologies.

Global Robotization

Robots everywhere, different sizes and tasks!
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The most famous global manufacturers of robots are the German company KUKA-Robotics and the Japanese FANUC , but there were much more of them at the exhibition.





Such robots are common in the automotive industry, in particular, installed at the TESLA plant, and in many places.



Moreover, robots are positioned not only as for solving standard tasks such as packaging and assembly, but also for additive production and control of rejects using 3D scanners.

STRATASYS

Before you - a completely new robotic FDM 3D printer from Stratasys, created in collaboration with Siemens and KUKA



This additive robot allows you to achieve significant strength and lightness of the product due to the combination of the arrangement of layers, and also saves material, as it works with 8 axes and moves both the robot arm and the table in space, adjusting the object to the desired print angle.



Such robots are designed primarily for aerospace, defense industry and automotive industry.

Stratasys is already working with Ford and testing these machines to work on the conveyor.



Such multi-axis 3D printers in the future want to use on assembly lines.

Of course, the technology is still raw at the moment, but this concept should be perceived more as the first steps to introduce rapid additive production into the mass traditional one.



The next new product from Stratasys is an industrial 3d-printer, which adapts to the production needs of the customer and allows you to create dimensional objects of complex shapes right in the shop.



This engineering marvel looks like this:



In essence, this is a FDM 3D printer, powered by granules of composite material and operating in its own heat chamber.

Machine control panel:



The birth of the very parts of the heat chamber



In addition to Stratasys industrial solutions, the J750 multi-material multi-color 3d printer was introduced.



Specifications:



Its distinctive feature is the ability to use not only individual colors, but also shades in combination with a rather large working chamber.

What allows you to achieve this result here:





Among the shortcomings, this is of course the price of the equipment and consumables.

3D SYSTEMS

This Major introduced a decent response Carbon 3D, which will be discussed below. Robotic solution for fast and high-precision modular mini-production - Figure 4 (Figure 4).





The name of the installation has a reference to the included in the old patent of 3D Systems from 1984, filed by Chuck Hull himself, an element that is called "Figure 4".

The installation can create objects with jewelery accuracy at a speed of Carbon 3D (not in hours, but in minutes), and the robotic arm collects building platforms, cleans objects from polymer and transfers the grown parts to the geometry control unit (comparison with the original CAD model) for marriage control.





At the same time, the quality of the models remains at the level. No defects were noticed, despite the very fast printing speed.

In 3D Systems, it is considered possible to replace Fugure 4 as a direct replacement for injection molding.

I personally convinced of the performance of the new prof. ProJet MJP 2500 mid-range car.

CARBON

A well-known startup Carbon 3D (recently just Carbon) in which more than $ 222,000,000 has already been invested from BMW, Nikon, General Electric, Autodesk, and even Yuri Milnera for the first time presented his legendary 3D printer M1, running on super-fast CLIP technology (100 times faster than competitors SLA-DLP)





The printer supports a large amount of materials (standard, detailed, heat-resistant, flexible and elastic resins) and is distributed so far only in the USA by a subscription only - a completely new scheme for this business.

I held demo objects in my hands and they were impressed with their quality.

HP

I was able to see the car, the announcement of which is already in 2014! Meet: HP 3D Printer with Jet Fusion Technology:



The process itself resembles SLS technology:





After you pick up a sample, there is no doubt - this is a powder printer. The only question is how the granules join: sintering, gluing or chemical reaction?

In any case, we are assured that it is at least 10 times faster than competitors. Well, we are waiting for the first cars in Russia.

On this of high-profile updates, perhaps all.

Despite the fact that the additive technologies at the exhibition occupied a very small part, this time they managed to make an impression and vendors show the right development vector that the market needs.



Vasily Kiselev , CEO Top 3D Shop