FORMNEXT LIVE: Polymer Accuracy, Repeatability and Closed-loop Monitoring with Inkbit

– Hi, my name is Adam Penna. I’m here at Formnext 2021 and I’m here at InkBit booth, and I’m talking to the CEO today of the company, Davide Marini. How are you today?

– Very well, thank you for inviting me.

– Yeah, it’s wonderful to be here and we had a great conversation before this talking about your technology and what you’re bringing to Formnext this year. So what brings you to Formnext this year?

– So we are delighted to introduce our new platform to the European market and we have a platform that was designed for industrial production. The machine is unique in the sense that for the first time we incorporate a 3D scanner that scans every single layer at voxel resolution and creates a 3D topographical map of every layer. So, the base technology is Inkjet but unlike traditional Inkjet which is based on a mechanical flattening of every layer, we don’t need to do that. So we have created this new technology to speed up the production of our parts and to make them much more accurate and make the machine more reliable.

– And you were talking about, this is a closed-loop process. Right?

– Correct. Correct.

– Yeah.

– So what’s interesting about this, so, we have an MIT spinout from Boston and we started live because we wanted to create a more accurate, more reliable Inkjet machine. So we wanted the multi-material platform but by integrating this 3D scanner, what we realized is that because there’s no need for mechanical flattening of each layer, we can use much better materials. So we can use high-performance for the polymers. For example, we use a pure epoxy resins, which is a dark cure resin so… And many other polymers of this nature of production grade have this characteristics that they cure over time, so you wouldn’t be able to use them in a traditional Inkjet machine. So, yeah, so the combination of having a scanner and being able to use high-performance with the polymers makes our platform unique in the sense that for the first time we can combine the fidelity, the precision of Inkjet with the possibility of going to production with production grade materials.

– That’s the exciting part is what’s going into production, what materials we’re using? And you talked a bit about the accuracy that you can get and I saw you have the soft materials where you can get a very high resolution on the soft materials. So talk about how you guys do that. This is amazing to me.

– That’s right, that’s right. So what’s very difficult is to create very fine structures in soft materials. And we can do this because our scanner scans each and every layer after the position and we dynamically generate the next plain pattern on the fly to take into account of any variability in the print. So we have a true closed-loop vision-based feedback control.

– Well, now everyone is trying to get to closed-loop. So you’re already there.

– That’s right.

– This is amazing.

– Yes, no, thank you, thank you.

– Well, thank you for talking to us, anything new coming up from InkBit that we should know about.

– So, I would say stay tuned. We will be announcing new materials probably at the next Formnext.

– Hey! All right! Well, thanks for talking to us today, Davide. I appreciate it.

– Thank you.

– Thanks a lot. This is Adam Penna from Formnext from the InkBit booth. Thanks for joining us.