Inkbit opens a new 38,000 square foot office to promote visual control jets

Guide: For further development3D printingTechnology, companies are actively deploying new3D printingManufacturing center for technology research and development, material testing, product manufacturing, etc.

△Inkbit Vista is specially designed for the factory floor and can be directly integrated into the existing manufacturing system. With fully automated production, manufacturers can significantly reduce unit costs and effectively expand production scale.

Visual feedback control driven3D printingMachine company Inkbit announced on August 24, 2021 to open a new office covering 38,000 square feet (about 3,530 square meters) in Medford, Massachusetts, to further expand its operational capabilities and provide closed-loop feedback3D printingEcosystem Inkbit Vista.

38,000 square feet of new office

Benefit from
After Inkbit’s $30 million Series B financing in July 2021
, This company has upgraded the previous workplace. This larger space includes areas for system assembly, material research, and hardware development. The office has a 3370 square foot (about 313 square meter) materials laboratory equipped with various industrial equipment, such as fume hoods and tensile testers. Able to safely carry out material formulation, chemical work, and hardware manufacturing and testing.For Inkbit customers and partners, there is also a digital factory of 8,100 square feet (approximately 752 square meters) with dedicated power supply and air lines for testing and development3D printingComponents, materials and hardware.

△ Actually produced multi-material parts

Inkbit separated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2017 and launched a multi-material with closed-loop feedback control in February3D printingtechnology. In March 2021, it received a $1.7 million Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award from the United States Air Force (USAF)Fundingcontract. On August 10th, Inkbit appointed Eric Bert to lead the commercialization of Inkbit Vista and accelerate the listing. Davide Marini, CEO and co-founder of Inkbit, said that Inkbit is starting a new phase of growth. The new office is able to shift the internal focus to team development and provide customers with the necessary tools to continue to innovate.

Machine vision and artificial intelligence enhanced3D printing

Inkbit use3D scanningThe system generates a structure diagram of each layer after printing, and corrects the difference with the expected geometric shape in the subsequent printing layer. The data is also used to train machine learning algorithms, enabling printers to learn the characteristics of each material and predict printing behavior. This ensures that parts are built quickly and accurately. Each layer scan can also perform a complete 3D reconstruction for each part, providing a complete digital record of each print, ensuring 100% quality control of the part.

△Visual control jet

The Vision-Controlled Jetting (VCJ) developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology meets the reliability and performance requirements of mass manufacturing by realizing real-time, in-process voxel-level control, thereby introducing additive manufacturing into production. Technology combines computing technology with scalable hardware architecture and material chemistry to develop high-performance polymer products in the following ways:

Real-time optimization: to achieve accurate and reliable printing. Inkbit’s vision system can capture the volume pixels of the printing process at high speed3D scanningData, modify each layer in real time to ensure perfect printing.
Simplified and automated workflow: visually controlled jetting enables simple, fast and non-hazardous partsPost-processing, To reduce costs related to material, labor, and equipment loss. This technology can also be directly integrated into existing manufacturing systems. Through fully automated production, manufacturers can significantly reduce unit cost and effectively expand production scale.
High precision3D printing：The resin3D printingPrecision is combined with production-grade materials.So far, accurate3D printingTechnology requires the use of certain non-durable materials, which will become brittle and weaker over time. Inkbit’s technology can remove materials containing acrylate and methacrylate to produce high-quality and durable parts.

△The actual scanned data captured by the scanner during printing. The blue part is a soft material, the red part is a rigid material, and the white part is a support material.

Visual control jet3D printingInkbitVista

Inkbit Vista has a proprietary vision control jetting solution and multi-material designsoftware, Enabling manufacturers to bridge the gap between prototyping and full-scale production. It is reported that Vista is an evolved version of a system called Multi-Fab developed by the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).The uniqueness of the machine is that it uses machine vision to scan each layer of the printed part, which not only improves accuracy and precision, but also embeds unprinted components into3D printingParts. When Inkbit was divested in 2017, Multi-Fab became Inkbit’s first prototype. The company rebuilt the system to version zero, and after many iterations it eventually became Vista.

△Inkbit Vista. Image courtesy of Inkbit.

The transformation includes changes to the architecture, such as changing the print head of a traditional jet printer that moves on a fixed bed. In order to achieve multi-material industrial manufacturing, the team reduced the weight of the hardware around the print bed. While keeping the print head still, move the print bed back and forth underneath.In addition, through Stratasys veterans (who later participated in this startup’s $12 million with DSM)invest) Suggested that a stronger frame was used to avoid system accuracy problems.

△Removable printing platform

Another major design is the optical coherence tomography machine vision system completed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). This technology relies on an interferometer to generate images with micron resolution from an optical scattering medium. The DARPA-driven vision system can lead the level of printing accuracy to the future system, so it is highly valued by the US defense organization. At the same time, they also introduced Inkbit to the U.S. Air Force, so they won a $1.7 million innovation research contract.

(Editor in charge: admin)

Inkbit opens a new 38,000 square foot office to promote visual control jets

0 Comments for “Inkbit opens a new 38,000 square foot office to promote visual control jets”

Leave a Reply Cancel reply