3D Printing News Unpeeled: Wind Turbines, Sculpteo and Axial3D

Sculpteo is to shutdown its online marketplace. The community design sales portion of the site will be turned off November 4th. Designers will still have access to their files. Alexandre d’Orsetti said of the move impacted only a handful of designers and ¨our overall online business continues to grow at pace and is in fact much more focused on production for end use parts and series.¨ Does this mean that the marketplace model was flawed? Or that we simply did not get enough scale to make it work? After all, an Amazon with only 1,000 customers wouldn’t work either. 

Axial3D and GE Healthcare signed an MOU that will see GE’s oZTEo bone imaging application to be used with Axial3D´s segmentation tools. This will mean that many more patient specific models, guides and perhaps even implants may be used in the future

The Department of Energy is to award $30 million to 13 projects in a bid to reshape the manufacturing of wind turbine blades. $2,849,000 of that is to go to the Composites Manufacturing Simulation Center (CMSC) of Purdue University and partners Thermwood, Techmer PM, TPI Compisites, Dassault and Dimensional Innovations. The ambitious project aims to make modular CFRP components using 3D printing for tooling. It is called “Additive Manufacturing of Modular Tools with Integrated Heating for Large-Scale Wind Blade Manufacturing” and will use 3D printing to hopefully reduce tooling costs by 40%, reduce weight by 25% and reduce cost by 35% while also making convective cooling channels and working on digital twins for manufacturing.