Reduce Manufacturing Costs and Lead Times while Delivering more Complex Metal Parts
3D Printing for Foundries
Foundries are adopting additive manufacturing solutions to address growing industry pressures that range from digitalization and the need for faster, more complex geometry patterns and molds to foundry labor shortages. In the age of the digital foundry, these solutions offer streamlined manufacturing workflows with higher degrees of automation, improved operational efficiency, as well as significant time and cost savings.
3D Systems has decades of expertise in metal casting solutions development. While investment casting foundries have been using 3D printing to produce casting patterns for decades, sand casting shops have been taking advantage of additive manufacturing in the recent years. In both cases, we have developed specific and integrated additive manufacturing (AM) solutions that maximize your productivity, reliability, flexibility, and yield – delivering your customers high quality parts while reducing total cost of ownership (TCO).
Supporting Your Business Growth, Profitability and Responsiveness with Additive Manufacturing Expertise for Metal Casting
The Role of 3D Printing within Metal Casting Workflows
Overcome the geometry and time constraints common with conventional machined molds for wax pattern injection, replacing it with a fast, tool-less process that opens the door to greater design freedom while improving product performance. Digital processes and additive manufacturing technologies are poised to deliver massive time and cost savings.
Accelerate production delivery, optimize parts, and reduce manufacturing costs by creating reusable patterns and core boxes for traditional sand-casting production process. Our advanced software and 3D printing solutions, and large selection of affordable materials will help you to quickly and easily optimize designs and produce patterns and cores with excellent wear resistance and superior surface finish for the final part.
Let us Help you Gain a Competitive Advantage
Complex metal parts that were previously challenging to produce can easily be made a reality by leveraging 3D printed patterns. More efficient designs enabled by 3D printing also allow to optimize consumption of expensive and/or difficult to source metal alloys.
Design Flexibility
Accuracy, precision, surface finish and mechanical properties are critical factors for casting patterns and molds. Achieve the performance your process requires with advanced 3D printing solutions and materials that deliver the expected specifications, whether it is stability, temperature resistance, durability, clean burnout and much more.
Performance and Reliability
With 3D Systems’ solutions capable of 3D printing patterns and core boxes in hours, foundries can optimize their casting workflow and easily adjust to design changes, enabling rapid order fulfillment and faster metal parts delivery. Increase the flexibility and control of your operation by printing patterns and molds on demand.
Responsiveness
Talk to an Expert
Our 3D printing materials for metal casting have been developed to fit into conventional processes. With a choice of 100% wax material for high resolution patterns for standard lost-wax casting processes or castable plastics for ash-free clean castings, you can produce high quality sacrificial patterns for investment casting without tooling. For reusable sand casting patterns, we offer materials that not only have better durability than wood but have equivalent benching properties for post-processing.
Materials Developed for Your Applications Needs
Our additive manufacturing solutions include software, printer, materials, and post-processing designed to deliver industry-leading quality, reliability, and productivity to keep your operation running efficiently. Reduced labor enabled by downstream compatibility with automation, minimized waste with high material efficiency, and reduced finishing with smooth pattern surfaces contribute to reduced cost per part.
Productivity & Operational Efficiency
In-house patterns and molds production guarantees part delivery with reduced lead time and costs, for a streamlined supply chain without risk of damage during shipping. 3D printing on demand also increases the flexibility and control through your processes while reducing storage.
Supply Chain
Continuity
