Farsoon made a series of announcements, including a sixteen-laser metal 3D printer.
The company, certainly one of the largest in the world, produces both metal and polymer industrial 3D printers. The announcements included two new 3D printers and two materials announcements.
Let’s look at the materials first.
The most interesting might be the announcement of PEBA materials for the SLS system. PEBA is an unusual and rare material for 3D printing. Farsoon explains:
“PEBA (Polyether Block Amide) is a high-performance thermoplastic elastomer (TPE) composed of alternating rigid polyamide segments and flexible polyether segments formed through copolymerization. Compared with commonly used flexible materials such as TPU or flexible photopolymer resins, PEBA offers significant advantages including excellent elasticity and rebound performance, high tear resistance, and outstanding fatigue durability, capable of withstanding more than 200,000 cycles of 90° bending without performance degradation.”
In other words, a far better flexible material.
The second material announcement involves an expansion of their third-party material compatible program, the “Open Materials Ecosystem”, to include certain materials from Advanced Laser Materials. These include HT-23, PA11 Black, FR10, and others from ALM.
Farsoon FS812M-U
The smaller of the two machine announcements was for the new FS812M-U, a large-format metal 3D printer. The company’s previous machine in this size, the FS811M, was quite successful with over 40 systems sold worldwide. They say they’ve spent four years working on a new design to succeed the FS811M, and that turns out to be the FS812M-U.
The major difference is footprint. As you can tell from the image, these are very large and tall machines that occupy considerable space in a workshop. The new FS812M-U is described as using 41% less footprint space than its predecessor, which is quite significant.
In addition, the FS812M-U also offers a larger build volume — but in height. Whereas the FS811M offered 840 x 840 x 960 mm, the new FS812M-U has a build volume of 810 x 810 x 1700 mm. In other words, it’s optimized to print tall metal objects. The FS812M-U comes with eight or ten lasers for rapid parallel 3D printing action.
Farsoon FS1311M
The new Farsoon FS1311M is an enormous metal 3D printer, offering a build volume of 1310 × 1310 × 1650 mm. This is certainly one of the largest build volumes available today for any metal 3D printer.
Printing larger objects can take considerable time, but that is solved in the FS1311M by using not eight, not ten, but sixteen lasers. Each laser can be either 500 or 1000 W for rapid 3D printing.
Is it fast? Farsoon said the FS1311M can print 1440 cubic cm in Ti-6Al-4V at 150 µm layer thickness. That’s about 6.38kg per hour, or 153kg of metal per day.
The size and speed of the FS1311M are not the only interesting features. The device also includes:
- Closed loop powder management
- Recoat monitoring
- Multilayer gas flow
- MES connectivity
Farsoon’s goal with the new machine is to enhance metal additive manufacturing operations by providing greater speed, size, and manageability.
I expect these new machines and materials will be welcomed by Farsoon customers.
Via Farsoon
