Sculpteo: 2020 in review

Posted By Lucie Gaget on Dec 18, 2020 | 0 comments

As 2020 comes to an end, and we can say it has been quite a challenging year. The Sculpteo team is proud to have been able to continue to support all their clients in their additive manufacturing projects this year, and we would like to thank you for all your trust and loyalty.

Even during this pandemic situation, Sculpteo worked to offer you more advanced manufacturing options with new materials, and more specialized content to help you through your manufacturing challenges.

Maybe you missed some great news. Here is a little review of Sculpteo’s year.

New high-performance materials

In 2019, BASF acquired Sculpteo. This year, thanks to BASF, Sculpteo has been able to offer its customer more advanced materials and new technologies. Sculpteo’s new high-performance materials provide the mechanical properties you expect from traditional manufacturing with the benefits of 3D printing. Demanding sectors such as aerospace, automotive, electronics, and robotics can now benefit from the advanced properties of these materials. These high-performance materials are:

PA11, a launch of bio-derived 3D printing materials:

Ultrasint® PA11 ESD: Ultrasint® PA11 ESD is a bio-derived powder with electrostatic discharging properties for increased process safety in advanced applications. With its interesting mechanical properties, this material offers new possibilities for a wide range of applications, especially for the electronics sector.

Ultrasint® PA11 CF: Ultrasint® PA11 CF is a carbon-filled, bio-derived powder for advanced Powder Bed Fusion applications. This material is one of the strongest materials in the 3D printing industry, combining high ductility and impact performance as well as really high rigidity.

Ultrasint® PA11 & PA11 HP: Two classic PA11 versions of this bio-derived powder with exceptionally high toughness. These materials have the particularity of offering high ductility and impact strength for all applications. Do you need durable parts able to withstand high mechanical loads and stress? Ultrasint® PA11 and PA11 HP are options to consider.

PA6 3D printing materials:

Ultrasint® PA6 FR: Ultrasint® PA6 FR is an advanced engineering polymer powder for Powder Bed Fusion with an innovative formulation containing a flame-retardant (FR) additive. This high-performance material can be used for electronics projects, or for various applications inside the transportation sector.

Ultrasint® PA6 MF: PA6 MF is built on the chemical base of reinforced PA6; it boasts extremely high rigidity, media tightness, and enhanced thermal distortion performance. You will be able to get 3D printed parts with extremely high strength and rigidity and its resistance to high temperatures.

Polypropylene 3D printing materials:

Ultrasint® PP nat 01 and Jet Fusion PP: These 3D printing Polypropylene materials are offering strength, ductility and stiffness to manufacture your end-use parts. This PP is perfect to create chemical resistant, lighter, and watertight/airtight parts.

3D printing flexible plastic materials:

Ultrasint® TPU01 and Ultrasint® TPU 881: This material is made out of Thermoplastic Polyurethane powder, offers durable, strong, and flexible parts. These two TPUs can be used to manufacture footwear, or sports protection equipment. With their flexibility, these TPUs can also be used in the automotive industry, to create car interior components.

We also launched other new materials:

Prototyping Resin: A 3D printing material is perfectly adapted to the development of prototypes and could improve your whole prototyping process. This resin offers the opportunity to create highly detailed parts and non-functional prototypes.

Big Rep PLA: PLA plastic or polylactic acid is part of the most popular 3D printing materials used for additive manufacturing. This PolyLactic Acid-based polymer is a 3D printing filament. PLA material is printed using BigRep 3D printers and mainly used to manufacture big parts up to 1x1x1m

Ultrafuse® 17-4 PH: This 17-4 PH stainless steel can be fully heat-treated to high levels of strength and hardness. This Ultrafuse® 17-4 PH material is characterized by its impressive strength. It is also one of the most affordable materials for metal 3D printing!

Our webinars

Benefits of additive manufacturing for the drone industry: a webinar about the advantages of 3D printing for the drone industry with Aurélien Authier from Hexadrone, and Alexandre D’Orsetti, Director of Sculpteo Studio.

How to create projects with high-performance materials: This webinar in French is a collaboration with Allizé Plasturgie, it will offer you interesting insights about the specificities and opportunities of design for additive manufacturing.

More Ebooks & informative content

Combatting COVID-19 with 3D printing: COVID-19 has obviously been a huge subject this year and impacted all business and industries. Additive manufacturing played a major role during the pandemic and taught us a lot about manufacturing and supply-chain management.

Risk Management and Additive Manufacturing: How can additive manufacturing help facing risks? For a lot of businesses, the COVID-19 pandemic emphasized some existing problems of their global supply chains. The strengths of additive manufacturing can help to face, or even prevent these risks. Let’s find out how!

Experts give their top tips for Drone Manufacturing: What are the key aspects you should focus on while manufacturing drones with 3D printing? From the design aspect to the business challenges and the choice of materials, our experts will tell you what they’ve learned by using additive manufacturing for their drone projects.

We launched our learning hub, a platform where you can find all the resources you need to stay at the forefront of innovation. On our learning hub, you will learn about all the design specificities of additive manufacturing, find the perfect materials and technology, benefit from business tips, and discover the endless applications of 3D printing.

Content to support your additive manufacturing projects

State of 3D printing 2020

This year, more than 1600 individuals answered our survey, which makes it our biggest survey in six years. The increasing number of respondents is actually allowing us to create an in-depth analysis of the additive manufacturing industry. We would like to thank all the 3D printing users who took the time to answer this survey, offering us the opportunity to create this survey with solid data this year!

If you missed it, you can still download our complete State of 3D Printing 2020 report for free!

Additive Adoption A-Z: The Adaptable Manufacturing Playbook

To help you with your adoption of additive manufacturing we created a playbook. Innovation, adaptability and scaled manufacturing are the axes of improvement offered by additive manufacturing, which also participate in adding more flexibility to your business. This playbook has a practical part, just for you! In this last part you will have the opportunity to evaluate where you can find adaptability in your business by implementing additive manufacturing in your business strategy.

Download your Playbook for free right now!

Assessment tool: Is 3D printing right for your business strategy?

Do you want to implement additive manufacturing in your business? In order to make the most of this manufacturing technology, you will need to perfectly understand the areas and aspects where 3D printing could help you save time and money Use our assessment tool to evaluate the potential of 3D printing for your company! This will only take you a few minutes and you could be surprised by the results.

Special operations

Your orders are important. We want to give even more meaning to your projects thanks to great collaborations! This year, we lead several operations to give you a chance to make donations for great causes while ordering on our online 3D printing service.

For the Earth month in April, we made a partnership with Reforest’action. Your participation throughout the month with the orders you’ve placed on our online 3D printing service resulted in the planting of a forest made of 10 600 trees!

Thanks to all of you we supported the research to fight breast cancer in October

In November, once again, your donations during your ordering process on our website were given to research against prostate cancer.

We can’t wait to work with you on your next projects in 2021!