Making very large parts has always been a problem in manufacturing.Molds are expensive, tooling is slow, and scaling up often means starting over.Perseus Materials was created to change that.
Born out of Stanford University, Perseus is taking a fresh look at how very large, load-bearing composite parts are made, from wind turbine blades to ship components, by blending additive manufacturing (AM) ideas with advanced chemistry and new manufacturing processes.“We’re not trying to make 3D printing a little better,” Daniel Lee, co-founder and CEO of Perseus Materials, told 3DPrint.com.“We were asking why some of its core limitations exist in the first place.” From Stanford Chemistry to Manufacturing Reality Perseus was founded in 2022 by Daniel Lee and John Feist, both researchers at Stanford.
Lee was a postdoctoral scholar in Stanford’s chemistry department, while Feist was a PhD student.Their work led to a publication in Nature Chemistry and, eventually, to the realization that they had something commercially meaningful.Daniel Lee, co-founder and CEO of Perseus Materials.
“We worked together on a couple of papers,” Lee said.“That’s when we realized not just that the technology was different, but that we worked well together as co-founders.” At the same time, Lee was watching the AM industry closely: “I’m not a hater of 3D printing; it definitely has its niches.But between 2020 and 2022, I watched the world become obsessed with it, and then slowly grow disillusioned.” To Lee, the industry was focusing heavily on more robotics, more precision, more software, without addressing deeper constraints.
“There’s a fundamental limit that robotic arms and software alone can’t break through,” he explained.Questioning the Nozzle One of those constraints became a turning point for Perseus: “We started asking very basic questions.Like, why are 3D printing nozzles circular? That simple question opened up a bigger issue.
Circular nozzles are great for detail, but they make printing slow and introduce layer-by-layer defects, especially when parts get large.By definition, it makes things slow,” Lee said.“And it introduces defects.” Instead of refining the nozzle, Perseus went deeper, into chemistry.
“We realized the chemistry we were working on actually solved many of these issues, not just for 3D printing, but for multiple composite manufacturing processes.” The result was a completely new approach: changing how heat moves through materials and letting the material itself do much of the work.“Once we made that leap — that we could make heat move very differently — suddenly a lot of limitations disappeared,” he said.Letting Chemistry Do the Heavy Lifting Traditional composite manufacturing depends on machines to supply heat and energy.
Perseus does the opposite.The duo shifted the burden from the machine to the chemistry.And at the center of Perseus’s technology is a specialized resin system that uses a phenomenon called frontal polymerization, a concept known for decades but rarely used in manufacturing because it’s so difficult to control.
“If you watch normal resins cure, it’s like watching paint dry,” Lee noted.“Everything cures slowly and evenly.But Perseus’s resin behaves very differently; you can literally see the cure move.
It goes from zero percent cured to 100 percent cured, like a wave moving through the material.” This approach allows Perseus to build large composite structures quickly, without massive ovens, molds, or energy-intensive tooling.“We’re embedding the energy into the material itself,” Lee said.“So the machine doesn’t have to bring it.” Built for Scale, Not Gadgets Perseus doesn’t sell printers, at least not right now.
The plan is to sell components.“What customers understand best today is the part itself,” Lee said.“Many don’t want to rethink their entire manufacturing process; they just want a part that works.” The company has developed its own modular manufacturing system, designed specifically for large parts.
Some machines can already produce components up to 25 feet long, and the system is designed to scale further.“Our goal is very simple,” Lee noted.“We want customers to call us and say, ‘I need this 80-meter part, can you make a thousand of them?’ And we want to be able to say, ‘Yes, and you’ll have them in three days, not months.’” Right now, Perseus is closing its first paid pilot in the wind energy industry, producing a large internal component for a wind turbine blade.
“For wind, this is actually a relatively small part, about 15 feet long,” he pointed out.“But that’s our niche.Big things.” Why Wind, Ships, and Construction Perseus originally targeted construction, but has temporarily shifted focus.
“Composites aren’t fully written into building codes yet.That acceptance is coming, but it takes time.Wind turbine blades, however, are already composite structures, and they’re getting bigger every year.
That made wind a natural first step.” From there, shipbuilding quickly came into view.“On a high level, a blade and a ship are very similar,” Lee said.“They’re both large, curved, composite structures.
In many of these applications, weight matters less than cost, speed, and lead time.If we can make something cheaper and faster, even if it’s not ‘perfect,’ there are many places where that still wins.” Unlike many composite companies, Perseus isn’t focused on making the strongest or lightest material possible.Instead, the company prioritizes how easy and fast a material is to manufacture.
Even if a Perseus composite performs worse than steel in some areas, it can still make sense if it’s cheaper and faster to build with.“If it’s cheaper, faster to build, and easier to assemble, that can matter more.” Lee also challenges how manufacturers think about materials: “It’s wild to me that we pull something out of the ground and think it should be easier to work with than a material we design from scratch,” he said.“With synthetic materials, we should be able to tell them how to behave.” Not Just Another 3D Printing Startup Lee doesn’t think of Perseus as a pure 3D printing company.
“I honestly don’t care what material we use,” Lee said.“If we could do this with steel, we would.But steel doesn’t play nicely, and we can’t tell it what to do, unlike our resins.
That lets us build large skeletal structures with composites, then finish them with whatever materials make sense.” For Lee, Perseus is not a side project or a hobby.In fact, he left Stanford early to pursue it full-time.He said focusing on academic research wasn’t his goal.
“This was just too exciting,” he exclaimed.After two years of validation, mostly funded by the Department of Energy, NSF, and ARPA-E, Perseus officially stepped into the spotlight in mid-2024, including its debut at the Roadrunner Technology Forum.“Now the proof of concept works,” Lee concluded.
“The question isn’t how it works anymore, it’s to scale up as quickly as possible.” If Perseus succeeds, it could reshape how some of the world’s largest structures are made, not by printing layer by layer, but by letting chemistry lead the way.Subscribe to Our Email Newsletter Stay up-to-date on all the latest news from the 3D printing industry and receive information and offers from third party vendors.Print Services Upload your 3D Models and get them printed quickly and efficiently.
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