Aurora Labs Ltd. officials announce significant speed increases achieved for the current Alpha unit of Aurora’s Rapid Manufacturing Technology (RMT). The company has been able to achieve speed increases of 2.5x the recently announced rates and is now printing at 1.667kg/hr, equivalent to 40kg/day.
This printing speed is approximately 20x the speed of a comparable size, commercially available, machine that can print titanium (CP-Ti). This speed increase was achieved following various testing programs, optimization of the printing process and print parameter development. The company’s goal at this stage has been to optimize both print speed and quality of the current Alpha unit.
The company will continue to run a series of tests with the RMT with the goal of achieving a print rate of 1,000kg/day. The next round of tests will be focused on hardware changes to achieve further speed increases with the goal of reaching around 30x the current market speed* with a single printing unit.
Beyond that, the company will look to link two or more alpha unit cores together to form faster units to allow for very high-speed printing as the RMP has been designed to scale through its modular nature. This will also prove out in very practical terms the scalable feature of the technology. Once two or more units are successfully combined to work together, the speeds that can be reached will be direct multiples of those currently being achieved.
The target market for Aurora’s RMP is the global metal manufacturing market, expected to reach $4 trillion by 2020. Successful scaling of the RMP will allow printed parts to be manufactured at a price that is expected to be cost competitive with traditional metal manufacturing.
* What is market speed?
Aurora Labs defines Market Speed as the speed at which a comparable machine can print Titanium (CP-Ti). Market research has shown this to be 81.7g/hr or 1.96kg per day