I had an interesting chat with two companies partnering on materials: Carima and Tethon 3D.
Carima is a Korean company that’s been making 3D print products since 2000, specializing in resin materials and equipment. In fact, a couple of years ago, we reviewed their amazing CMYK non-toxic resin set.
Tethon 3D is an Omaha-based company that specializes in ceramic resins. They offer perhaps the widest selection of ceramic resins on the market today, which can be printed on many devices. To obtain the final ceramic parts, a post-processing treatment is required to purify the ceramic part.
It turns out that Carima is now a distributor for Tethon 3D resins. This arrangement seems quite complementary, as Carima does not produce its own ceramic resins. This is unsurprising as ceramic resins are more complex to develop than standard polymer resins.
Carima’s flagship 3D printer is the DM400, which is a rare top-down resin 3D printer with a significantly large build volume. It uses a DLP light engine to very quickly produce prints, and there is an automated post-processing capability.
Here you can see a large set of dental aligner molds produced on the DM400, which can be produced in reasonably large volumes due to the speed of the printer and wide print plate dimensions.
Carima explained that they have one customer that operates five of these machines, and in a single year, were able to produce one million parts on the equipment.
Meanwhile, Tethon 3D has been exploring the dental space, and they’ve developed a new resin specifically for crowns called 3Y Zirconia.
If you aren’t familiar with the “3Y” prefix, it refers to the chemistry of the ceramic. Zirconia is subject to cracking during cooling, and the addition of yttria as a stabilizer prevents the cracking. This makes parts made from 3Y Zirconia exceptionally hard.
In fact, the material is much harder than the typical composite material used by dentists to produce crowns. This should be quite an attractive material for dental operations, and you can see some samples at top. Tethon 3D hinted that they are also working on a lithium disilicate resin that hasn’t been released yet.
The dental materials are still quite new, but Tethon 3D is seeking 3D printing partners in the dental industry. If you’re a company that makes dental 3D printers, this could be an opportunity for a new and powerful product.
