Our Expertise

We design and manufacture advanced shell sand 3D printers, which use our patented 3D printing process - Selective Powder Deposition (SPD). SPD prints intricate sand molds and cores for metal casting. SPD overcomes Binder Jetting (BJ) limitations with complex mold geometry. At the same time, SPD process is simpler, which allows us to offer our printers at a fraction of BJ cost. We also provide consulting in the direct metal 3D printing technology.

Comparison of SPD with Binder Jetting (BJ)

	Cost	Min feature size	Shape limitation	Moisture tolerance	Controllable collapsibility	Multiple materials	Max size	Speed
Binder Jetting	high	small	med1	no	no	no	large	high
SPD with sintering	low	med	low2	yes	yes3	yes4	large	med5

SPD ADVANTAGES

COST:

Desktop Metal's ExOne S-Max: Starting at $1.4M

Voxeljet's Voxeljet VX1000: Starting at $1M

Aladdin3D's Model C: Only $15K; Model G: Only $45K

¹ With Binder Jetting, after printing, to remove partly bound sand, every surface must be cleaned with a brush and compressed air. So, every surface must be accessible, which prohibits complex internal geometries.

² With SPD, unbound sand can be simply poured out. Any few remaining sand particles can be removed by shaking or washing with water. So, complex internal geometries are possible, as shown in DIY 3D printing of sand mold for metal casting video.

³ With SPD, collapsibility of different regions of the mold can be controlled independently by using different shell sands with different grain sizes and different binder amounts.

⁴ SPD allows different materials to be deposited in different regions. For example: a thin layer of zirconia sand can be deposited around the casting, and metal shot (chill) can be deposited near the regions that need to be cooled down first.

⁵ With SPD, speed depends on the object's complexity. For small and complex objects SPD is slower than Binder Jetting. For large and simple objects SPD is faster than Binder Jetting.