PT Blog

As the year is coming close to an end, it’s always good to take a look back at all the exciting new developments in the growing additive manufacturing (AM)/3D printing space. This year, we saw more of a focus to incorporate AM on the production floor; more material offerings and lots of exciting applications. 

I asked HP, Carbon, EOS, Essentium and Ultimaker to highlight some of the key applications and developments in AM that took place in 2019.

Earlier this year, Carbon and Lamborghini announced a partnership to digitally manufacture production parts. The companies have expanded this partnership and Carbon will now digitally manufacture both the central and lateral dashboard air vents for the Sián FKP 37, Lamborghini’s first hybrid production car. Earlier this year, Carbon and Lamborghini produced a new textured fuel cap and a clip component for an air duct for Lamborghini’s Super SUV, the Urus model. This new collaboration to produce 3D-printed air vents marks a significant milestone in Lamborghini’s partnership with Carbon.

For the Sián FKP 37, Carbon Digital Light Synthesis (DLS) technology combined with Lamborghini’s design and craftsmanship resulted in these new air vents.

Biobased and easy-to-recycle self-reinforced composites based on PLA fibers with an inherent high stiffness, which are being developed within the framework of the Bio4self project funded by the European Research Fund H2020, open up completely new fields of application for PLA. The progress to date and the promise of future developments impressed the judges of  this year’s Global Bioplastic competition to award first prize to Bio4self. The prize was awarded by the trade journal Bioplastics magazine to the winning consortium, represented by Belgium’s Centexbel, on Dec. 3, 2019 during the 14th European Bioplastics Conference in Berlin, Germany.

An international consortium with the participation of Centexbel, Germany’s Fraunhofer ICT, Germany’s Institute of Textile Technology of the RWTH Aachen and 13 other partners, has developed a self-reinforced composite of PLA. In the Bio4Self project, two different PLA grades are required to produce self-reinforced polymer composites or SRPCs: a low melting temperature PLA grade to form the matrix and an ultra-high stiffness and high melting temperature PLA grade to form the reinforcing fibers.

Earlier this month the results of the European Bioplastics’ annual market data update were presented at the 14^th European Bioplastics Conference in Berlin, confirming dynamic growth of the global bioplastics industry. “In an increasingly environmentally conscious environment, the global market for bioplastics is predicted to grow by more than 15% over the next five years,” says Hasso von Pogrell, managing director of European Bioplastics.

The market data was compiled in cooperation with the German research institute nova-Institute. The data for the global production capacities of bioplastics are based on the market study “Bio-Based Building Blocks and Polymers” by nova-Institute (2020).

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