Carbon bulks up its PU resin packs

Redwood City, California – 3D printing specialist Carbon is now offering some of its polymer resins in bulk packaging. This will provide high-volume manufacturers with a price cut.

The first resin to benefit from the larger pack sizes is RPU 70. The rigid polyurethane cost around 60%/litre of smaller packs, and Carbon said it hopes to get the price down to around 40% of smaller packs, by integrating novel approaches for dispensing and distributing resins to a fleet of printers.

‘This production volume materials approach will allow us to ensure that our partners like adidas, which will be printing thousands or millions of parts, can do so economically compared to other manufacturing methods such as injection moulding,’ said Carbon’s CEO and co-founder Joseph DeSimone.

The bulk packs have been made possible by the introduction of a meter mix and dispense resin dispensing instrument, which was developed in partnership with Henkel Adhesive Technologies. Used in conjunction with Carbon’s SpeedCell manufacturing system, it will allow bulk quantities of RPU 70 to be dispensed properly.

Adidas has already committed to use Carbon’s materials on a scale of hundreds of thousand so litres as it prepares for the mass-production of its Futurecraft 4D athletic footwear. Ford is also working with Carbon, on the technology’s implementation in automotive applications.