Apr 12 2018
Tell us about the company and why you are attending Ceramitec 2018.
XJet is an additive manufacturing company. Although you may find a lot of additive manufacturing in plastics and in metals, we are one of the first people to bring it to the ceramics industry. We believe that our unique technology will open the ceramic market, bringing ceramics into a much broader range of adaption in every manufacturing area.
Our technology allows us to apply additive manufacturing to the ceramics market, from short run times all the way down to a run of one part. This has the advantage of being able to create highly complex geometries that were previously unavailable to ceramics.
What products are you highlighting at Ceramitec 2018?
Our main product line is a turnkey solution. We’re coming out of the labs after spending 10 years and $100 million and approaching the world of ceramics. This is one of the first times in history that a common additive manufacturing system has been presented to the ceramics industry. But in addition to the system itself, we also supply the material, which is unique. It’s the first of its kind because it's a material that we created.
We are a team of guys who know how to use inkjet technology, that’s what we’ve been doing for the past 30 years. We have had success with other companies before, but when it comes to ceramics or metal, this is your next solution. We take particles and we suspend them or in the dispersion, so we can jet them. Using our technologies, we are able to jet 200 million droplets per second. The droplets are very small, but there’s a lot of them and the solution is very fast and highly accurate.
What makes XJet different from any other additive manufacturer in the market?
There is an easy way for me to define this. You remember red, green and blue (RGB) in television? Red represents the properties of the part. We don’t use a lot of binder like other systems, and we get no porosity. That’s something that is new to the industry, so we call it the red part. The red part enables us to create very complex geometries that were previously impossible to generate, because we are using two different materials; we jet the material itself but we also create a support structure from a completely different material.
The blue part represents accuracy. With our technology, we are able to achieve accuracies that have never been achieved in this industry before. We go below 100 microns. That’s a tenth of a million, so it’s extremely small. The drill we created has a 2,400 conformal pulling channels that are all connected and each one of them has a diameter of approximately 110 micros and a length of 10cm. That’s big news for the industry.
Green stands for the green forest. This is the first system, because we put everything into the same cartridge. Our machine operates in a safe, office environment, with operators able to be trained within a day.
It’s not complex and it’s safe – nobody needs to inhale small particles, we take care of that in the lab. When we are done we lock it into the machine and the machine takes care of everything. So we have the red; the mechanical properties the physical properties, the other end we have the blue; the sharpness the no need for post processing and then we have the green; the simple and safe and calm operation for users.
Which industries are you targetting at Ceramitec?
As it’s our first time here, we are here to learn. In 2015 we didn’t even print ceramic parts, we were focussing on certain metals. We are here to find partners so that we can start to develop and tailor things for specific applications.
Having said that, we still have certain applications that our first buyers are using. Whether it's medical, dental, or related to the specific needs of the aerospace industry, and to some extent the automotive industry, we have technology to suit.