Good morning, everyone. My name is Meisam Shir Mohammadi. I’m from BASF, and I’ll be talking a little bit about flexible 3D printing.
BASF is the largest chemical company globally and we are the largest manufacturer of TPU and MPU. Our group for 3D printing is around 240 people. The majority of them are located in Europe, but we have an application and commercial team in North America of 18 people. So these are the partners that we work with.
We have over 800 different combinations of materials for 3D printing for different technologies. We divided it into 4 categories: filaments, photopolymers, powder-based, and software simulation for 3D printing. Here is the portfolio: the TPU line, polypropylene, PA 11 (nylon 11) materials, and our powder material portfolio for 3D printing. We have nylon, in SLS, but we have polypropylene and TPU in, pretty much all powder-based technologies. Then our photopolymer, the same thing.
We have different categories of photopolymers also ready to print, along with our filaments. You can see we have 4 different flexible filaments for 3D printing. Then we offer simulation, which is the lattice design for additive manufacturing.
We are the only supplier that offers life cycle analysis on materials and also printed parts. So that’s something that we started in 2024. You can get a life cycle analysis of the printed part as a part of the sustainability effort that BASF is putting and bringing into that market.
TPU Applications
For our TPU, I just put examples of applications here in a nutshell. So, we have a heavily data-driven material. We have done a lot of testing on it. It’s a highly recycled material. And, it is easy to print, and we offer solutions for coding. We also offer solutions for lattice design optimization.
The actual material is a semi-hard, elastomeric material. But with lattice design optimization, you can go very soft down to around 20 to 30 shore A to 88 to 90 shore A of material. This material is particularly relevant for industries such as health care, consumer goods, and automotive. That’s what we see quite a lot. And some of the seals and soft touch toolings.
I’ll give some more examples. We have some of these parts actually in our booth if you wanna stop by and see them. Tests on the material include measuring cycling loading and how long it would take to break it for consumer goods. We have flame-resistant, skin contact, recycling, and bonding tests for attaching flexible materials.
These are some examples of applications. The first one is spring spacer parts used for performance cars when they are transferred. Dealerships often removed them.
The material that we offer in 3D printing is very similar to the type of TPUs that are used in spring spacers. It’s offered by BASF for injection molding. However, because of design change and design iteration, they needed over 1,000 of these parts to train technicians. It is also used for bridge production till the new parts come in. This is another example of using flexible 3D printing material that offers the same performance as injection molding or traditional manufacturing to bridge the gap between design changes and final parts from traditional manufacturing.
This is an example of consumer goods for mass customization. This is protective gear for a wrestling helmet. So the customer printed the parts all in 1 piece. And as I mentioned, we offer different flexibility in different parts. So the whole helmet was printed in 1 piece. As a result, they saved around 4 months on production, around 500k in tooling costs, and over a 250-gram reduction in the weight.
Mass customization using TPU can also be leveraged for medical applications. So the blouses that are used for for radiotherapy cancer treatment are usually generic. Right now they are one size fits all. However, for patients to have very targeted radiotherapy, they need parts that are very accurate and wrap around their body. So this is an example of a soft touch feel of a material that can be around the skin and can have skin contact for medical applications.
You can see that it has a 40% reduction in the gap between a patient’s body and the PAR for more accurate radiotherapy. It also saved 30% of the time for the clinical work. You can see more examples and more about our material with the QR that I provided.
Thank you.