Velo3D Ships First Sapphire XC to Aerospace Customer

Velo3D has delivered its first Sapphire XC large-scale 3D printer to an aerospace customer to improve its additive manufacturing capabilities. The Sapphire XC (or Extra Capacity) is the company’s newest and largest metal 3D printer which is said to deliver both faster production and larger parts. The Sapphire XC is a scale-up version of the Sapphire printer, utilizing the same Flow print preparation software, Assure quality control software and Intelligent Fusion manufacturing process.

The company says the Sapphire XC is built to enable a seamless transition of parts that were developed and qualified on Sapphire to the larger, more productive Sapphire XC to reduce the cost of producing parts by up to 75%. Sapphire XC also expands the use of Velo3D’s production solution to parts that are up to 400% larger in volume than the largest parts possible with the original Sapphire. The aerospace company receiving the new Sapphire XC will use it to scale up production of its product which is built using the Sapphire fleet of metal 3D printers it already has.

“Because our customer is already utilizing our end-to-end production solution, they can immediately and seamlessly move parts to Sapphire XC to achieve a phenomenal production rate increase,” says Benny Buller, Velo3D CEO and founder.

It is one of the largest available laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) printers with a build volume of 600 mm × 550 mm, which is 400% larger volume than the original Sapphire system. It also offers 8 lasers × 1,000 W each and utilizes the same optical-train design, recoater technology, gas-flow technology and metrology as the current Sapphire. Together, these features are said to increase throughput by up to 400%, which lowers the cost of produced parts by up to 75%.