Raise3D, a Rotterdam-based company with offices in Shanghai and California that designs and manufactures FFF 3D printing solutions for LSEs and SMEs, recently announced the addition of 32 industrial filaments for its E2CF 3D printer, intended specifically for printing fiber-reinforced materials. The desktop carbon fiber filament 3D printer was announced last summer, and has been available for purchase since January. Based on the company’s general purpose E2 3D printer, which acts as a development platform for future optimized 3D printers, the E2CF model serves as Raise3D’s entry-level system for fiber-reinforced filaments, behind the flagship industrial RMF500 machine.
“The Open Filament Program (OFP 1.0 & 2.0) is a long-term collaboration between Raise3D and filament manufacturers to identify top-performing filaments and to provide a large variety of proven materials validated by Raise3D for our customers,” explained Minde Jin, PhD, Director of Materials and Applications at Raise3D. “With the OFP 2.0, we strive to cooperate with the best filament manufacturers worldwide to ensure compatibility as well as excellent mechanical properties and printed parts performance. We focus on the properties and performance of the final printed parts. Raise3D engineers optimize all OFP 2.0 filaments printing templates with guidelines, not only based on part performance validation, but also the experience and input from our end-use application cases, to bridge the gap between materials and applications.”
Available for purchase from authorized resellers at €3,999 in Europe and $4,499 in the rest of the world, the durable E2CF is excellent for manufacturing and prototyping. Carbon fiber reinforced filament has high strength, low density, and resistance to corrosion, high temperatures, and static electricity, which are all useful qualities for industries that require considerable strength-to-weight ratio in their solutions, such as aviation and automotive.
The 32 additional filaments result from collaborations between Raise3D and the following 16 filament manufacturers that participate in the company’s Open Filament Program:
- BASF Forward AM (2)
- Covestro (2)
- eSUN (1)
- Extrudr (1)
- FiberThree (3)
- Grupa Azoty (2)
- Handtmann (1)
- Jabil (1)
- Kexcelled (1)
- Kimya (2)
- LEHVOSS (6)
- NHH (2)
- Polymaker (2)
- RadiciGroup High Performance Polymers (1)
- Spectrum Filaments (3)
- TreeD (2)
When asked what the motivation was for joining Raise3D’s Open Filament Program 2.0, Dean Di, R&D Engineer at BASF 3D Printing Solutions, had this to say:
“Raise3D is always providing (additional) values and possibilities based on Raise3D eco-system for their customers, and OFP 2.0 is one of them. With OFP 2.0, which could be summarized as an open material platform for engineering and high-performance composite filaments, Raise3D shares with us an industrial-level composite printer and this give us a great accessibility to BASF high performance filaments. So that it’s easier for our customers to work with our machine/material combination to develop and print industrial suitable applications. Adding our materials towards OFP2.0 increases the user experience and the possibility on a first time right experience what will lead to a higher chance for structural use of 3D printed applications.”
These 16 filament manufacturers not only are members of Raise3D’s Open Filament Program (OFP), but have also achieved high-quality results with their filaments on the Raise3D E2CF 3D printer.
Thiago Medeiros Araujo, PhD Global Product Manager at LEHVOSS Group, explained why the company had decided to approve its filaments for the E2CF, saying, “LUVOCOM 3F materials focuses on delivering high-performance printed parts and for that, the combination with a good printer is essential, the E2CF allowed us to have a repeatable outcome with very high-performance.”
“Raise3D E2CF is a very stable printer – it can keep printing with the same quality for a long time and the consistence between printers is also very good,” explained Raymond Huang, Head of Product Management at Polymaker. “This feature makes Raise3D E2CF the one of most popular printers in our R&D team.”
The 32 filaments approved for the OFP 2.0 all have consistently high performance during long-term operations, as well as a high strength-to-weight ratio, making them well-suited for the automotive and aerospace industries, as previously mentioned, in addition to healthcare, and applications like industrial end-use parts, jigs and fixtures, and engineering tooling. All of the approved filaments in Raise3D’s Open Filament Program, as well as printing profiles for the E2CF to ideaMaker that can be downloaded and imported, can be found on Raise3D’s ideaMaker Library.