Rapid manufacturing and copying techniques
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Rapid Manufacturing: Custom-made products
Additive manufacturing is the use of layer-based technologies for end production.
Materialise owns the world's largest RP capacity based in one location and treats these technologies as real production techniques. This puts us in pole position to practice Rapid Manufacturing.
Although rapid manufacturing exhibits a lot of potential, it’s a production manner which is not yet well known. At Materialise, however, it has become firmly established as we have been involved somehow with virtually every application that’s currently known in the industry.
The most-known application is undoubtedly the .MGX design collection.
Materialise.MGX
In 2003 Materialise started up a new division – Materialise.MGX – focusing on design products made with 3D printing techniques.
.MGX combines art and technology by using its high-tech background to produce a series of exceptional design products.
Technologies like stereolithography and selective laser sintering offer an almost unlimited freedom of design. The aim of .MGX is to unleash a new era of mass customised design based on RP technology.
Read more about .MGX Design products on this website
Rapid Manufacturing for the creation of concept cars
More and more car manufacturers are using the benefits of additive manufacturing in the production of concept cars. The process opens a new world of design freedom and allows concept cars to be built faster than with the traditional methods. One of the major advantages is the possibility to personalise designs. Materialise has already built up a broad knowledge in the field of additive manufacturing for concept cars. Several recent concept cars consist of Materialise additive manufacturing technologies: Pininfarina's Sintesi, Citroën's Hypnos and GT, Renault's Ondelios, Mazda's Kiyora, …
Materialise SurgiGuides
This is another solution in which Materialise integrates advanced design automation and rapid prototyping technology to facilitate mass customization.
Based on the patient's anatomy (obtained via CT scans), custom drill guides for dental implants are designed and manufactured.
Read more about SurgiGuide on the Materialise Dental website
Rapid Shell Modeling (RSM)
We have developed a complete software solution to design custom hearing aid shells & earmoulds in a few minutes. The resulting designs can be produced directly by a rapid prototyping machine. More than 1,5 million shells have already been produced successfully by hearing aid manufacturers all over the world.
Read more about RSM in our software products overview on this website
