In today’s 3D Printing News Briefs, we’re starting with a formal name change for an African industrial technology company that’s a major user of additive manufacturing (AM) in the oil and gas industry.Then, we’ll move on to 3D printing for investment casting, and end with a interesting bio-based material for AM in architecture and interior design.RusselSmith Formally Changes Name & Transitions to Arridex The company formerly known as RusselSmith recently announced a formal name change to Arridex.
The change, registered with the Corporate Affairs Commission of Nigeria, reflects a major expansion of its capabilities, as well as the industries it is now serving.Arridex was originally founded as an asset integrity company to serve the oil and gas sector in Nigeria, but it now operates across aerospace, defense, construction, maritime, and manufacturing as well.The organization has Pioneer Status in AM, which was granted by the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission (NIPC), and it’s actually the first company that the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC) qualified for AM deployment in the oil and gas industry.
The formal name change also coincides with a major operational milestone for the company.West Africa’s first multi-technology industrial AM facility, the Arridex Omnifactory, was commissioned in Lagos this month, and offers a variety of AM technologies, like LPBF, SLS, CSAM, and FFF, for on-demand production of spares and industrial components.“The name RusselSmith defined what we were at the start.
Arridex defines what we have built,” explained Kayode Adeleke, Group Chief Executive Officer of Arridex.“The dependency of African industry on fragile supply chains is a structural problem that this continent has accepted for too long.The Omnifactory is a concrete answer to the challenge of manufacturing sovereignty.
Arridex is the name of the company built over two decades and raised intentionally to enable industrial resilience in Africa.” Addressing America’s Investment Casting Crisis with Digital Foundry DDM Systems, which specializes in ceramic 3D printing for investment casting, wants to address the investment casting crisis in the U.S.That’s why the ITAR-registered company has commercially launched its Digital Foundry platform, which is a vertically integrated approach to reduce casting lead times by eliminating tooling from the process.The platform combines three proprietary technologies: Large Area Maskless Photopolymerization (LAMP), which prints ceramic casting shells using patterned UV light; DirectPour, which delivers ready-to-pour ceramic shells with integrated cores to partners; and Scanning Laser Epitaxy (SLE), which enables direct 3D printing of single-crystal, equiaxed, and directionally solidified superalloy structures.
DDM Systems says its Digital Foundry platform gets rid of 100% of upfront tooling costs, reduces scrap rates by about 90%, and delivers a 10x reduction in lead time for castings, with customers receiving precision metal castings in days, instead of months.“The American casting industry has been hollowed out over decades, and the consequences are now showing up in every major defense and energy program in the country,” said Dr.Suman Das, the Founder, President, and CEO of DDM Systems, and the Morris M.
Bryan Jr.Chair Professor in Mechanical Engineering for Advanced Manufacturing Systems at Georgia Tech.“Our Digital Foundry is not a prototype or a concept.
It is a production-ready platform that is already delivering castings for the U.S.Air Force, gas turbine manufacturers, and aerospace OEMs.“We built this technology over 15 years with DARPA and ARPA-E support specifically to solve the problem of a shrinking domestic casting base.
The Digital Foundry does not replace foundries.It removes the tooling bottleneck that prevents foundries from responding to demand at the speed the defense and energy sectors require.” Researchers Develop Bio-Based Material from Yeast for Architectural Elements Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have developed a new, entirely bio-based material from a somewhat unexpected ingredient: yeast.Credit: Chalmers University of Technology | Henrik Sandsjö A large amount of resource consumption and global emissions comes from the construction sector, and a research team from Chalmers University of Technology studied how industrial residual products can be used to make new materials that can increase circularity in architecture.
The team developed a new bio-based material from baker’s yeast, which can be 3D printed and customized for architectural and interior design elements, like room partitions, wall systems, or sunlight protecting screens.In this case, yeast isn’t used for fermentation, but as a biomass.Heated yeast is combined with cellulose fibers from wood, alginate from algae, glycerol from plants, and water to form a 3D printable hydrogel.
Pressure-based 3D printing, carried out at room temperature, is used to fabricate the architectural elements from the hydrogel, and no support structures or heating are required.The material is biodegradable, and the researchers found they can even adjust the formula to change its color, surface texture, and transparency.As they explain in their study, this material could eventually become an environmentally friendly alternative to plastics and synthetic textiles.
“The future of architectural ELMs, or Engineered Living Materials, is very exciting, with great potential to customise them to perform a variety of functions.This could, for example, involve self-healing materials or materials that purify the air by neutralising harmful substances and pollutants,” said Malgorzata Zboinska, Professor at the Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering at Chalmers and leader of the study.“What we have achieved so far is an important first step towards establishing a completely new type of architectural material.
You could say that we are laying the foundations for future developments that combine sustainability, functionality and design in entirely new ways.” 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.Powered by FacFox Powered by 3D Systems Powered by Craftcloud Powered by Xometry 3DPrinting Business Directory 3DPrinting Business Directory
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