Metal Binder Jetting System Features Enhanced Resolution

Desktop Metal (Burlington, Mass.) is launching its Shop System metal binder jetting solution. The company says its binder jetting technology prints metal parts in volumes and at part costs unattainable with legacy additive manufacturing processes.

The Shop System is designed to bring metal additive manufacturing to machine and job shops with an affordable, turnkey solution that manufactures complex parts at speeds up to 10 times those of legacy powder bed fusion additive manufacturing (AM) technologies. Desktop Metal recommends the Shop System for industries spanning from automotive and oil and gas to consumer products and electronics.

Featuring what Desktop Metal says is the highest-resolution and most-advanced print engine in the binder jetting market, the Shop System is a complete end-to-end solution that includes a single-pass, binder jetting printer; a drying oven for hardening green parts prior to depowdering; a powder station for depowdering parts with built-in powder recycling; a furnace designed for accessible, industrial-strength sintering; and integrated powder handling accessories and workflow.

Desktop Metal says its Shop System’s software interface is simple to use, and users can easily attain high-quality surface finishes at high resolutions. Speeds up to 800 cm^3/hr at 75-micron layer thickness enable batches of tens or hundreds of complex printed parts in as little as five hours.

Customers can print dense, complex parts with rich feature detail and surface finishes as fine as four-micron roughness average (Ra) out of the furnace due to the Shop System's printhead supporting droplet sizes as small as 1.2 pL, with drop multiplexing up to 6 pL. The Shop System’s advanced single-pass printhead with a 1600 native DPI delivers 400% higher resolution than legacy binder jetting systems. The printhead’s 5x nozzle redundancy – 25% higher redundancy than comparable binder jetting systems – supports reliable print quality.