Sand (and plastic) binder jetting 3D printer vendor voxeljet also operates as a major service provider. In 2020, its service activities have delivered an impressive 131 000 3D printed parts, which if stacked would measure 604 metres in height (based on the average build platform of all 3D printers operated in the company’s European Service Centre).

That’s not all. The total machine runtime to produce these parts was 32 000 hours, which is 1 333 days or 3.7 years of printing. In total, the weight of the materials consumed reached 750 metric tons. These are not “standard” 3D printing material consumption rates but this is what sand binder jetting can achieve today.

The VX4000 is the largest 3D printing system for sand moulds in the world. With a contiguous footprint of 4m x 2m x 1m, it is unique in terms of build volume

About two-thirds of the parts produced were printed in sand with furan resin-based (FDB) binders. The rest is divided between plastics (mainly PMMA) and sand using phenolic resin-based binders. Voxeljet’s 3D Parts On-Demand service can deliver anything from polymer models, plastic patterns or moulds and cores for metal casting or finished castings, right through to effective outsourced industrial production of small and medium-sized components and sand mould series.

The German company’s 3D production specialists for additive manufacturing have built experience over two decades and in Germany alone, the company offers on-demand service with production capacities of over 4 700 000 litres per year. In addition, voxeljet now runs service centres in the USA and China.

Developed for 3D sand, plastic and ceramic printing, voxeljet Universal Binder Jetting (UBJ) is a powerful 3D printing technology for producing high-precision sand, PMMA and ceramic prints.