01.12.2021 • News • Additive manufacturing

Advanced efficiency and process control of AM systems

Prima Additive, a business unit of the Prima Industrie group, Borsa Italiana, and Materialise, a global provider of 3D printing solutions, are intensifying their collaboration in the optimization of metal additive manufacturing systems.

The collaboration between the two companies has led to the optimization of the Print Genius 150, the additive manufacturing system by Prima Additive with powder bed fusion technology featuring two lasers working on the same area. On this machine, Prima Additive has integrated Materialise’s MCP (Materialise Control Platform) hardware control to obtain real-time control functions and a streamlined combination with external systems to assist the process, such as monitoring and control systems.

Born from powder (Source: Prima Additive)

3D printing machine software interface (Source: Prima Additive)

A major result of the integration between the companies is the development of a laser workload balancing algorithm that allows to exploit the two lasers to the maximum. Thanks to this algorithm, the two lasers are able to work in each layer for the same amount of time, automatically distributing the work in a homogeneous way and eliminating the moments in which only one of the two lasers is at work, maximizing the benefit of having two lasers on the same machine. The first Print Genius 150 resulting from this collaboration was installed at the University of Leuven, Belgium, in April 2021.

“After the successful integration of our state-of-the-art Machine Control Platform (MCP) into the Print Genius 150, we demonstrated together that our Optics Load Balancing solution ensures an important gain in printing efficiency without loss of print quality. It was also nice to see how the teams – however being located at different sites during Covid-19 travel restrictions – succeeded in delivering such a successful project in such a short time period. The companies form a strong complementary partnership and we are looking forward to further joint projects with Prima Additive,” declares Jan Van Espen, research manager at Materialise.

“This first joint project between Prima Additive and Materialise is the first brick of a research and business partnership for the two companies that will continue to invest in an ever more profitable technological collaboration for the development of increasingly performing and easy-to-use machines, with the target to make additive technology more usable for SMEs and for all the companies that want to integrate this technology profitably in their production contexts,” comments Paolo Calefati, head of additive manufacturing and innovation at Prima Industrie.