Leading Danish additive manufacturing service bureau Prototal Damvig A/S has expanded its 3D printing portfolio with the purchase of a Stratasys H350™ 3D printer through Stratasys reseller, Protech. Prototal Damvig’s investment will drive new areas of business growth through volume production and complements an existing line-up of Stratasys additive manufacturing (AM) technologies that comprise FDM® and PolyJet™.
The H350 3D printer is designed to meet the needs of customers in industries such as automotive, commercial and consumer goods, and electronics for large volumes of fast, accurate and cost-effective production-grade parts. For Prototal Damvig, that includes robust end-use load bearing parts, such as brackets and mold tools, as well as complex functional parts with moving hinges, gears and clips.
“The launch of the H350 3D printer has extended our ability to realize high-volume production quantities using AM,” says Susanne Damvig, CEO at Prototal Damvig. “It significantly improves our arsenal by also giving us the firepower to help our customers shorten their design-to-part cycles, decrease supply chain dependency and reduce their spare-part inventory.
Damvig’s customer base ranges from one-person companies to large corporate powerhouses spanning a variety of industries, from robotics and drones to the medical field, so the H350’s suitability for a wide range of industry applications was key. “This 3D printer specifically provides us with the design flexibility, repeatability and production quality to deliver accurate, high-quality parts that meet our customers’ industrial-grade manufacturing needs – from bulky parts through to complex designs,” says Damvig.
The H350 uses counter-rotating rollers to coat powder layers onto the print bed and prints absorber fluid to image the part layers. A passing IR lamp fuses the imaged layers over the entire span of the print bed, providing uniform thermal conditions to ensure part consistency for all build parts on the print tray.
The first available powder for the H350 is Stratasys High Yield PA11 material, which is derived from sustainable castor oil. An engineering-grade polymer, the material enables a high nesting density while maintaining high part consistency to deliver production yields.
“We were impressed with the quality of parts printed with PA11 material – it surpassed all our expectations,” Susanne Damvig says. “Not only does it offer smooth surfaces, high ductility and high impact resistance with no compromise, but crucially, it is a 100% bio-based plastic made of a renewable raw material. This was key for us.”
With full supported from GrabCAD Print™ workflow software, which has been enhanced specifically for the H350 3D printer, users can now manage their production-scale AM operations across the entire digital thread – from design through production.
“We’ve seen 3D printing evolve from a prototyping solution into a technology now deep rooted within manufacturing,” says Thomas Tønnesen, Sales Director, Nordic Group at Protech. “The H350 provides customers like Prototal Damvig with a new level of flexibility – whether that’s optimizing existing production operations or opening up new business opportunities for volume production and customization that were previously not possible.”