Desktop Metal Delivers Mid-Volume Metal 3D Printing System

Desktop Metal’s Shop System is a metal binder jetting system that is designed to enable affordable, batch production of high-quality metal parts. This turnkey metal additive manufacturing (AM) solution is said to achieve exceptional surface finish parts with rich feature detail at speeds up to 10 times faster than those of legacy 3D powder bed fusion (PBF) technologies.

According to the company, the Shop System offers a high-resolution, mid-volume production solution with its high-speed, single-pass print engine, and eliminates many of the constraints imposed by traditional manufacturing methods. It is said to offer reliable production of serial batches of complex, end-use metal parts in a fraction of the time and cost of conventional manufacturing and comparably priced AM technologies.

Featuring a high-resolution, advanced print engine, the system is a complete end-to-end solution that includes a single-pass, binder jetting printer; a drying oven for hardening green parts prior to depowdering; a powder station for depowdering parts with built-in powder recycling; Desktop Metal’s furnace designed for accessible, industrial-strength sintering; and integrated powder handling accessories and workflow. This turnkey solution can seamlessly integrate with existing shop operations.

The system features an easy-to-use software interface, as well as engineered powders and processing parameters optimized for use with the system to deliver exceptional quality and ensure repeatability. It also offers high productivity with speeds up to 800 cc/hour at 75-micron layer thickness, enabling batches of tens or hundreds of complex printed parts in as little as five hours. Customers can use the system to print dense, complex parts with incredibly fine feature detail and surface finishes as low as four-micron roughness average (Ra) out of the furnace due to the Shop System's high-resolution printhead - made possible through droplet sizes as small as 1.2pL, with drop multiplexing up to 6pL.