Addifab: Pushing the Boundaries of Additive Manufacturing

We recently spoke with Lasse Guldborg Staal, CEO, Addifab about his take on his company as well as the state of the additive manufacturing (AM) industry – where it is and where it’s going.

Based in Denmark, Addifab is a global company built on market knowledge and high ambitions. Based on its experience, the company has developed a unique soluble mold tool enabling a process known as Freeform Injection Molding (FIM).

With its innovative Print→Inject→Dissolve process, the Freeform Injection Molding technique is free of any design or material choice limitations. By printing the tool, you can create unseen designs. You can mold unseen products and business potential by injecting virtually any available material before dissolving the molding tool.

Staal kicked things off by saying, “Addifab was founded in 2014, December, 2014, by me and two other co-founders. We have a background in the hearing aid industry, and decided to found Addifab to create better 3D printers for high-precision manufacturing. Early in the life cycle of the company, we got into injection molding, and we now believe it to be the best possible alternative for injection molders wanting to adopt 3D printing for support of their processes.

MCADCafe Interviews Lasse Guldborg Staal, CEO, Addifab

“Injection molders work with plastic materials and normally use metal tools to produce parts. Metal tools are expensive and time consuming to produce. So, what we do with the 3D printing is to create injection mold tooling that is faster and cheaper, and it’s actually also greener than the conventional metal tooling. If you want to have a low cost injection molded prototype, I think the Addifab technology freeform injection molding is probably your best and most cost effective alternative.”

___________________________________________________________________________________

“At Addifab, we are committed to helping innovators capture the full potential of their ideas, and to bring their products to market faster. With Freeform Injection Molding, we deliver on this commitment; start-ups bring their ideas to market using our technology, and global industry leaders adopt our technology to boost their product development.”

Lasse Staal, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder, Addifab

___________________________________________________________________________________

“What we’ve tried to do with our technology freeform injection molding is to reduce the costs and reduce lead times. We also want to provide injection molders with a new level of design freedom. And for this reason we have created injection mold tooling that is soluble because if you can dissolve your injection mold tooling, you can create geometries that are impossible to mold with any other method.”

“We can use any material that is available for the injection mold industry. You’ve got a breadth of materials that are not readily available for 3D printing. And that’s one of the key arguments why we want to make injection molding available for prototyping, because there is a range of materials that is simply not available for 3D printing.”

“We do have competition to a certain extent. We are not the first ones to employ this hybrid technology approach. We are not the only ones doing 3D printed tooling, but we are the only ones with soluble tooling that allows us to bring the design freedom from 3D printing into the injection molding industry. And we are the printed tooling concept that offers the widest possible range of materials. We can do the softest droppers, hard metals, and ceramics. We can do everything in between because there is very little stress on the components when you dissolve your mold.”

“Our partnership with Nexa3D was actually born out of needs that we have identified with our existing customers, and it was born out of a desire to start bringing freeform injection molding to more users and with better support. So Nexa3D has pioneered, extremely high speed 3D printing. They have one of the most productive 3D printing systems on the planet. And we have customers who have been asking us repeatedly, can you provide us with bigger machines with larger build planes that can allow us to make bigger components. With the Nexa3D collaboration, we can answer ‘Yes’ to these questions. It’s an extremely high productivity system that allows us to bring something entirely new to our customers.”

Addifab’s Philosophy

Addifab recognizes the need for sustainability in modern, responsible manufacturing. Staal said, “We recognize the markets’ need for material access and design freedom with high speeds and low costs. We recognize the need for a paradigm shift in product development to meet today’s consumers’ demands, and we recognize the difficult path to get there. That is why we have developed Freeform Injection Molding. To enable the paradigm shift, to open the path to unseen creativity and material possibilities. To mold the unseen.”

___________________________________________________________________________________

“We want to impact your product development, not our planet. Therefore, our facilities are powered by 100% green energy.”

___________________________________________________________________________________

Regardless of whether your business is prototyping, production, or personalization, FIM provides the optimal blend of flexibility, scalability, versatility, and sustainable tooling as detailed below:

Product Development – Freeform Injection Molding brings transformative prototyping speed to the injection molding industry — at lower costs and with more design freedom than any other prototype injection mold tooling technology.  

Production – Freeform Injection Molding combines the quality, scalability, and versatility of injection molding with the short lead times and low start-up costs from 3D printing, resulting in an ideal tool for high-mix, low-volume production where complexity is high, and the need for flexibility is even higher.

Personalization – Freeform Injection Molding is built for one-off situations, and the technique has been proven in diverse applications that range from prosthetics used in the Paralympics to dental aligners.

The Addifab Process

Freeform Injection Molding speeds up tool iterations with unseen details and tight tolerances and provides a gateway to optimum design freedom while maintaining the strengths and benefits of injection molding.

Print

Addifab’s 3D printer is specialized for injection mold tool making. Expect high precision, tight tolerances, and unseen design freedom enabled by our unique dissolvable resins. The printer utilizes Digital Light Processing (DLP) UV-curing with 10µm resolution and general tolerances of 10-50µm on the injection molded component.

Inject

Freeform Injection Molding tools apply to any injection molding machine, with an injection pressure of up to 2500 bar and max melt temperature of 450°C (842°F). The molding tools are compatible with all conventional injection molding feedstock materials, such as composites, thermoplastics, thermoplastic elastomers (TPE), silicones (LSR), ceramics (CIM), and metals (MIM) – in shot sizes from 0.1g to 100g.

Dissolve

The essential enabler of Freeform Injection Molding is the soluble injection mold tools. Rather than ejecting the component from the injection mold tool as in conventional demolding, each injection mold tool dissolves to release the injection-molded part. This unique process gently submerges the filled injection mold tool in an alkaline-water solution for ~12-48 hours. The demolding process is analogous to melting an ice cube.

Prototype with Production Material

Imagine being able to prototype with the materials you use for production and process on the same machines. Freeform Injection Molding gives you that.

The choice of materials is one of the most critical decisions faced during development. Freeform Injection Molding is the ideal prototyping platform. It supports the full range of injection molding feedstock, treats the materials the same way, and achieves the same isotropic material properties as conventional injection molding for accurate manufacturing grade testing.  

A prototype in a different material made by a different process is simply look-a-like, and therefore it will not perform like the final product. It produces components that are manufacturing grade with the exact material properties of the production part – ready for test and qualification.

Freeform Injection Molding gives you access to everything from any legacy materials to medical-grade materials to FDA-approved materials. In other words, all materials approved for injection molding are compatible with Freeform Injection Molding.

The ability to iterate swiftly is an essential requirement for a prototyping process. Conventional pilot tooling may be weeks or even months in the making, and modifications may be equally time-consuming. Freeform Injection Molding allows you to carry out multiple iterations, simultaneously.

With Addifab’s process it is possible to go from CAD file to molded component in a day. Add to that the fact that the molds are soluble, means you skip split mold lines from the beginning.

______________________________________________________________________

FIM is 88% faster than conventional injection mold prototyping. It means you can test five times as many ideas.

______________________________________________________________________

Addifab’s Future

As for the future, Staal said, “We plan to sell worldwide, but being a small organization, we want to scale up responsibly. If we put up machines in every corner of the world, our customers might experience poor service, and freeform injection molding is a concept that requires some skill, some training, some instruction. If we cannot provide this training and instruction, our customers will suffer. And then the Freeform Injection Molding concept will suffer. So we need to be very careful when we deploy our technology, so that we can deliver good support and customer experience.”

“We will be at the RAPID + TCT later this month together with Nexa3D, and we will be visiting several European trade shows, as well. We also have a strong collaboration with Mitsubishi chemical advanced materials. They operate freeform injection molding out of their facility in Arizona. So there are multiple ways to get in touch with Addifab and freeform injection molding, depending on your requirements.”

When asked what we might expect next from Addifab, Staal said, “I think you should expect us to dedicate very free extensive resources to rolling out the next collaboration. I think the customers we have right now are very appreciative of this new, larger productivity. So, but of course we need to make it available also to current non-users. You should also expect to see us increasingly implement Nexa machinery in our own operations, because as we need to be able to deliver support to customers, we also need to expand our internal capacity to work with customer projects as a service provider.”

For More Information: Addifab

Tags: Addifab, additive manufacturing, AM, FIM, Freeform Injection Molding, injection molding, Lasse Staal, Nexa3D, Video Interview

Category: Interview

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 3rd, 2022 at 07:15. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.