Sustainable Plastics -March/ April 2021 - 19

Q&A

Lower costs,
shorter
lead times:
Nanofabrica is
redefining the art
of mouldmaking
A company known for its uncanny ability to 3 D print miniaturised products and
components with micron resolution features at volume, Nanofabrica is not a name
that is readily associated with mouldmaking. Avi Cohen, Executive VP at Global
Sales, talked to Sustainable Plastics about the company's latest development, called
DRST. " It is what the market needed - and was waiting for, " he explained.
From miniaturised 3D printed
products to tooling - what's
the connection? How does
the one fit with the other?
First of all, let me say that nothing has changed. We still do
what we were doing before,
using the same additive manufacturing process and still
achieving a very precise 1 micron resolution. We did recently
present our AM (Additive Manufacturing) system, which is
called Tera 250. The name refers
to the 250 trillion voxel capacity of its build area. It features a
50x50x100 (mm) build plate that
can output thousands of mi-

cron-size parts in a single build.
Our new development is direct rapid soft tooling - DRST
- and it is a direct result of our
realisation that we had arrived
at what is almost a 'glass ceiling' with our technology. We
could deliver the precision and
the features, and we had the
build volume to fit in hundreds
of products; we could complete
manufacturing over a one-night
shift like a mass manufacturing
tool. And we had the customers.
What we didn't have was the
material, which is a common
challenge in the AM industry. In
other words, we had the form,

we had the fit - but the materials weren't strong enough to be
functional.
We still had a vision of delivering a technology that would
cater to mass manufacturing,
but what we had were materials
that were fine for prototypes - it
wasn't what we were aiming for.
The idea and the need for
the moulding application came
from the market. In fact, we had
customers asking us whether we could do something like
that. It was then that we realised that we not only achieved
the resolution that could create
these extremely precise and

micro features, the fact that we
could reach that high resolution
enables the surface finish to be
extremely smooth - in a way
that imitates a metal mould.
So, with direct rapid soft tooling - why 'soft', by the way?
- you are able to bypass the
materials problem?
Exactly. Ok, so first, 'soft' is just
a term used to refer to tooling
that is made from a material
that is 'softer' than steel. Sometimes it's also called rapid tooling. What this means is that it
won't last for millions of shots.
continued on page 20
March/April 2021

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Sustainable Plastics -March/ April 2021

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