Digital Metal Now Offers Automated Depowdering for Metal Binder Jetting 

Digital Metal now adds automated depowdering of metal binder jetted components to its offering.

“A key benefit of the DPS 1000 for Digital Metal customers is that it will free up time, and also bring consistency by removing the human factor from the equation,” says Alexander Sakratidis, sales and marketing manager at Digital Metal. 

One of the first customers for the DPS 1000 is Fraunhofer IAPT.   

“Metal Binder Jetting will enhance productivity and precision while at the same time reducing costs of metal additive manufacturing, which opens the door for series production,” says Dr. Philipp Imgrund, head of AM Processes Department at Fraunhofer. “However, one major technical challenge is depowdering of the green parts and we see a huge potential in working on automation solutions in this context.”

Dr. Imgrund believes automated depowdering will be key to industrialization of AM. “To date manual depowdering and cleaning have taken up most of the work hours in the binder jetting process. Automating this step makes the whole AM process cost efficient while ensuring more consistent part quality.” 

Fraunhofer IAPT is using DPS 1000’s ability to precisely remove metal powder from most geometries of any parts. The added manual cleaning option makes it possible to clean even tricky geometries after the initial program has removed most of the powder.

“With this system we can easily test multiply different powders to enhance the print quality and make more precise predictions on the shrinking of the sintering process,” says Dr. Imgrund. “It convinces with its precision, and even very delicate structures can be printed.”

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.