Durst is back in business – Phase II

30/04/2020

Durst was able to resume partial operations at the beginning of April, as the printing systems for the label and packaging industry were classified as systemically important. Now the Italian government has launched phase 2 to resume public life.

As an export-oriented company, Durst – starting immediately and in compliance with all necessary safety regulations – can start up production. On May 4 at the latest, the majority of the Durst’ler can be reached again at the headquarters in Brixen and the Customer Experience Center is then available again for customer appointments, machine demonstrations and acceptance tests.

Of course, Durst does not expect an immediate return to “normality”, which is why concepts for virtual presentations and webcasts have been developed in the past few weeks and are now being implemented in a timely manner for interaction with the stakeholders.

Durst will provide information on the respective offers and measures on the website www.durst-group.com and on social channels. Of course, international customers can also contact the global Durst branches for individual inquiries and priorities.

We will support these meetings as best we can with the technical possibilities in the Durst headquarters and Customer Experience Center. We are really looking forward to phase 2 and the opportunity to take the next step into normality with new interaction options.

Welcome back!

XJet from Home: Xjet sensational video series about ceramic printing

29/04/2020

A serie of videos about 3D ceramic printing. Each video will take you to one of five senses …

XJet sensational seriespart 1 of 5 – The Vision

XJet sensational seriespart 2 of 5 – Touch

Xjet sensational series part 3 of 5 – Smell

Xjet sensational series part 4 of 5 – Hearing

Xjet sensational series part 5 of 5 –

Taste

Manufacturing the Cars of Tomorrow, Desktop Metal’s new ebook

29/04/2020

Additive In Today’s Automotive Industry

In fact, many of the earliest adopters of additive manufacturing for automotive applications weren’t car makers themselves, but the race teams they sponsor.

For decades, companies from Ford to Ferrari have used racing as an incubator for testing new technology. Many of the features that are now standard on new cars – regenerative braking systems found in hybrid vehicles, push button ignitions and even rear-view mirrors – can trace their roots to the track.

The same goes for 3D printing – especially in metal.

Formula 1 teams, World Endurance Challenge teams, Formula E teams and more have experienced first-hand how the benefits of additive manufacturing – quick iteration on designs, rapid prototyping and lightweighting of parts – can translate to improved performance on the track.

And though 3D printing has been successful on the track, its often-prohibitive cost has kept it there.

While their focus on winning makes it easy for race teams to justify the high cost of complex printed parts, it’s not until companies can cost-effectively print them that 3D printed parts will become a widespread part of automotive mass production.

In other cases, 3D printing allows engineers to create one-of-akind vehicles destined for the racetrack.

With the ability to make parts faster, cheaper and more complex than ever before – this is how the cars of tomorrow will be manufactured.

In this ebook, we’ll explore how additive manufacturing is going to transform the way cars are made.

This includes commentary from thought leaders such as Ford’s CTO, Ken Washington, Customer case studies of ways 3D printing is being used today, and a variety of part examples where 3D printing is already impacting how automobiles are made.

PostProcess Webinar: How To Use Software-Driven Solutions

29/04/2020

If you’re still doing the bulk of PolyJet support removal by hand or with dated equipment, you’re likely dealing with unnecessarily long wait times, and warped or inconsistently finished parts. Attend this (previously recorded) webinar to learn about simplifying PolyJet 3D printing with the industry’s fastest software-driven automated support removal.

In this 20 minute webinar, you’ll discover an automated intelligent solution that will significantly increase the throughput and consistency of PolyJet 3D printed parts, while reducing operator time and numbers of damaged parts.

How a Boston hospital solved its swab shortage with help of a 3D printer

28/04/2020

When these Boston doctors ran out of virus-testing swabs, they mobilized an army of 3-D printers

In 22 days, engineers and manufacturers came up with four new designs

Nasopharyngeal swabs for coronavirus tests are displayed Tuesday after being produced at EnvisionTec, a maker of 3-D printers, in Dearborn, Mich. (Brittany Greeson for The Washington Post)

A month ago, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston was in trouble. Its Italian supplier of swabs for coronavirus tests had been forced to halt shipments. The hospital was unable to reach a deal with another supplier, Puritan Medical Products in Maine, that was struggling with surging demand. Doctors had barely a week’s worth of the crucial swabs left.

So Ramy Arnaout, a 43-year-old pathologist, put out calls for help. Among others, he contacted old classmates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Twenty-two frantic days later, the first of four prototypes were clinically validated.

Now, hundreds of thousands of these swabs — called nasopharyngeal swabs because they reach deep into nasal passages — are being churned out each day with the help of 3-D printers. By next week, production should be up to more than a million swabs every day, Arnaout said.

The scarcity of swabs has helped to hobble coronavirus testing in the United States. But that gap in the supply chain is starting to be filled by private ad hoc efforts, 3-D printing and do-it-yourself ingenuity. Tech executives, start-up founders, factory owners and engineers have applied a hacker mentality to get testing and other vital parts of the national response working more smoothly.

More than 100 brewers and distillers began manufacturing alcohol-based hand sanitizer after consumers and businesses plowed through inventories. Tech workers have built online platforms to help hospitals vet the new gray market of Chinese test suppliers. And teenagers started turning out face shields for medical workers on 3-D printers.

But few efforts have moved more swiftly, more collaboratively or — so far, it seems — more successfully than the quest to produce the nasopharyngeal swab, a sterile disposable medical device sometimes mistaken for its low-tech, cotton-topped cousin, the Q-Tip.

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“The big thing was, we were able to get from the identification of swab shortages to the first clinically validated, high-quality 3-D manufacturing in 22 days,” Arnaout said. “That wasn’t an accident.” In some cases, each swab prototype underwent 20 design iterations — and all of them were posted online. “We ran a radically open and transparent process,” he said.

The Food and Drug Administration does not require specific approval for swabs, but the manufacturers have asked the FDA to grant their designs emergency use authorizations in order to qualify for federal contracts.

Jason Spurlock, 25, arranges finished nasopharyngeal swabs at EnvisionTec. (Brittany Greeson/For The Washington Post)

The breakthrough on the mundane-sounding swabs is critical. Three months into the covid-19 crisis, bottlenecks in the supply chain have been slowing down testing, limiting the identification of carriers of the disease and hampering the public health response. Perhaps no item has been in shorter supply than the specialized swabs — a 15-centimeter (nearly six-inch) nylon-based stick, three millimeters wide and a little narrower at the flexible neck, coated with a material called flock that works to effectively collect the virus from deep in the upper respiratory passage.

“A nasopharyngeal swab not a joke. It goes about four inches into your head,” Arnaout said. “It has to be thin, long and flexible enough to get around the nasal anatomy, but it has to be stiff enough that you can twirl it to pick up nasal secretions you’re going to do testing on. They tell us in medical school that if the patient isn’t complaining, then you’re not doing it right.”

Now, individual hospitals and companies, having given up on a coordinated national strategy, are pursuing their own solutions and winning regulatory approvals needed to manufacture and use on a massive scale. And many of them — using 3-D printing — are finding ways around the traditional swabs made mostly by Puritan and Copan, the Italian manufacturer.

EnvisionTec, a maker of 3-D printers in Dearborn, Mich., since 2002, is one of the four new manufacturers working with Beth Israel Deaconess. It began producing nasopharyngeal swabs for coronavirus testing last week, after making 17 changes to its initial design.

The company is teaming up with a network of 500 affiliated medical labs that already use EnvisionTec printers to make medical devices such as dentures and mouth guards. They are now making 200,000 testing swabs a day and have the capacity to make 1 million a day, said chief executive Al Siblani.

Siblani said those labs had largely sent home their employees during the pandemic because their work had been deemed “nonessential.” They are gradually returning, he said, to make testing swabs on 3-D printers already designed to make safe, medical-grade products.

“All these dental labs, we are turning back on and bringing people back to work,” Siblani said.

EnvisionTec chief executive Al Siblani poses in front of a few of the 100 3-D printers at the company’s facility in Dearborn, Mich. (Brittany Greeson/For The Washington Post)

Siblani, 50, who immigrated to Michigan from Lebanon as a teenager, has worked on the swab project while recovering from covid-19. He believes he contracted the coronavirus in March, while installing equipment at a nearby hospital.

His fever peaked at 102, with a persistent dry cough, but he kept working from an apartment he rented to avoid infecting his family. Siblani called the illness harrowing because of the anxiety caused by the lack of a known cure for covid-19. The swab project kept him focused as he recovered after about a week.

“It was a personal mission as much as it was a business decision,” he said.

Siblani has been in contact with Vice President Pence’s office in hopes of getting federal funding through the Defense Production Act to produce more swabs faster. In addition to the network of labs with EnvisionTec printers, the company has more than 100 printers at its facility in Dearborn and can produce five more printers a day, with each machine capable of producing 100 swabs per hour, 24 hours a day.

If the funding comes through, Siblani predicts his company and its affiliated labs could make 1.5 million testing swabs a day. He said the swab consortium already is poised to make 4 million to 5 million a day.

The White House already has said it will use the Defense Production Act to help Puritan Medical Products, one of the few traditional manufacturers of testing swabs in the United States, substantially expand its capacity and open a second manufacturing facility near its headquarters in Guilford, Maine.

Puritan, a century-old family business that has its roots in making toothpicks and Popsicle sticks, has long been a leading source of medical testing products, with much of the wood coming from the abundant timber sources in central Maine. The new facility, which could open next month, will be designed to make 20 million testing swabs a month, with the potential to add more.

“We’re proud to be in the fight to produce the products to help defeat this crisis,” said Timothy Templet, executive vice president of global sales, whose grandfather founded the business that now employs 550.

Money provided through the Defense Production Act — Templet declined to disclose how much — is making possible the new facility, including the manufacturing equipment. Puritan shipped 1.5 million swabs for coronavirus testing this week, including 450,000 to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for distribution to various states.

Although Puritan is the leading U.S.-based maker of diagnostic swabs, Templet said he was not surprised that other companies are getting into the business at a time of global crisis.

“This isn’t going away,” he said. “We make diagnostic swabs. That’s what we do.”

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston led an effort to 3-D-print thousands of swabs for coronavirus tests. (Steven Senne/AP)

In the Beth Israel consortium, Carbon, a maker of 3-D printers, has teamed up with Resolution Medical, a Minneapolis-based maker of medical devices, to produce nasopharyngeal swabs. Medical experts, including members of a Stanford Health Care task force, helped develop that swab model using material ordinarily used for dental implants.

“The idea captured our imagination,” so Stanford fast-tracked its own study of the swab prototype, said Sridhar Seshadri, vice president of cancer, cardiovascular, radiology and transplant for Stanford Health Care. “This is going into somebody’s nostrils, so you have to be super safe.”

When the task force tried to sterilize the first batch of swabs from Resolution Medical, disaster struck. The sample swabs came out of the autoclave, a machine that sterilizes medical equipment with heat, visibly bent. The task force sent a photo of the results and soon learned that 3-D-printed swabs have to be inserted into autoclaves horizontally or they can melt.

“Then it was nail-biting for a few hours to see if the swabs came out right the next round, and they did,” Seshadri said.

Resolution Medical is now producing 100,000 this week using Carbon’s 3-D printers and is planning to expand capacity to more than 1 million in future weeks.

Arnaout said that one advantage of having an array of swab makers is that if one has a supply problem, the entire chain is less likely to break down.

HP, formerly known as Hewlett-Packard, learned of Beth Israel Deaconess’s plight because Annette Friskopp, global head and general manager of HP Specialty Printing Systems, had worked with hospital leaders. She and Lihua Zhao, head of the 3-D lab at HP Labs, coordinated the push for a new swab. A research and development lab in San Diego, one of three that HP has worldwide, was redirected to solve the problem.

“Within 48 hours, we had designed, printed, and shipped the prototypes for testing,” Zhao said in an email.

Unlike the other prototype makers, though, HP isn’t going to manufacture them itself. It is in late-stage talks with its partners and customers for them to start making the swabs.

Arnaout at Beth Israel said the hospital has been working to iron out other supply shortages. At one point, it looked as though the hospital would run out of the vials and fluid used to transport swabs to testing facilities. The fluid recipe was online. And when the hospital ran out of the vials, it found other tubes the same size. Hospital volunteers began adding fluid to tubes “to the tune of thousands of tubes a week,” Arnaout said. “We turned into a little factory here at Beth Israel.”

Another new swab producer is Origin, a San Francisco-based company providing software engineering to users of 3-D printers, among other things.

But when city residents were ordered to stay home, Origin’s 40 employees, deemed nonessential, turned to solving supply problems, in one case adapting snorkeling masks and filters to protect health workers. When it learned about the Boston hospital’s quest, the firm jumped in.

Now, a month later, it has become a medical device manufacturer that has passed a clinical trial test and is regulated by the FDA. Instead of delivering some 3-D printers to customers, Origin is using them to make swabs. Soon, it will be producing more than a million a week.

“If you told me a month ago that this is what our company would be doing and this is where we’d be, I’d have thought you were crazy,” said Chris Prucha, the Michigan-born chief executive of Origin. “But here we are.”

Massivit: Thank you to all our customers around the world for actively contributing 3D Printed Face Shields

18/04/2020

Massivit:

Thank you to all our customers around the world for actively contributing 3D Printed Face Shields to protect medical workers, police, and first responders!

So grateful we can assist across the globe.

Durst converts its demo center in Brixen to protective mask production

16/04/2020

Brixen, Italy – April 15, 2020 – Durst, manufacturer of advanced digital printing and production technologies, is responding to the lack of suitable protective masks for the industrial work environment by converting the demo center at its Brixen headquarters, South Tyrol, Italy.

On Monday, April 6, Durst was able to return to partial operation in its plants in Brixen and Lienz, East Tyrol, Austria, as the printing systems for the label and packaging industry were classified as system-relevant and customer productivity had to be guaranteed. Now Durst is going one step further and will convert the textile printing and processing systems, which are located in the demo center for customer demonstrations, to the production of protective masks. These are protective masks with an integrated filter function. Durst has many years of experience with filter systems, as these take on a kind of “cleaning function” in the printing press to filter out microparticles in the ink supply systems so that the print heads do not become clogged and are always ready for use.

With the extensive know-how of Durst Development and the Durst Laboratories, a certified filter membrane has now been identified, which is suitable for use in protective masks due to its high air permeability. The membrane with hydrophobic properties and microporous structure blocks particles with a filtration efficiency of up to 95% and is particularly suitable for industrial work environments. The protective masks are constructed in three layers, the polyester fleece textile materials are washable, the filter membrane can be reused after disinfection by spraying with alcohol and can also be easily replaced if necessary. The N95 classification of the filter membrane is available and Durst will also have the protective masks certified as a finished product.

Durst will manufacture the protective masks for its own group and sister company Alupress and make the production capacity and know-how available to other companies. Durst is currently investigating possible sales locations and structures for end customers in order to make the protective masks available to a broad population. In order to be able to meet the expected high demand promptly, Durst is also looking for other sewing companies to speed up the assembly work. Production is planned to start in mid-April and Durst is open to possible ideas to continue the initiative. For example, Durst will use an online editor to personalize the protective masks with graphics, text or a logo.

“After we were able to go back into partial operation at the beginning of April, we wanted to make our know-how and resources available to make our contribution to the protection of people,” said Christoph Gamper, CEO and co-owner of the Durst Group. “We have created the technical prerequisites. Now it is a question of starting production and gradually expanding our initiative to provide protective masks for as many people as possible in our region. With the individualization of the protective masks, we can even make it easier for our children to deal with the situation and we will also set up a creative competition for this.”

In addition to the production of protective masks on the demo printing machines, Durst has also switched parts of its ink production to its own hand disinfectant. The Durst Laboratory has formulated a virucidal and antibacterial solution based on ethanol for this, which can be used anywhere in handy 0.5 liter dispensers. Upon request, Durst also takes over the production and personalization of the hygiene article for third-party companies.

For further information on the Durst initiative visit:

www.durst-group.com/masks

WHAT MAKES THE DURST PROTECTIVE MASKS SPECIAL

High quality workmanship „Made in South Tyrol“ by Durst and protected sewing workshops
Special filter element, highly effective (type N95) exchangeable and reusable
Despite high filter efficiency, good breathability
Customizable with logo, text and designs
Textile materials are washable and OEKO-TEX^Ⓡ 100 certified

The protective masks are constructed in 3 layers, the polyester fleece textile materials are comfortable to wear and washable, the filter membrane can be reused after disinfection by spraying with alcohol and can also be easily replaced if necessary.

Spoonflower, Durham, North Carolina, USA

16/04/2020

After extensive research into best-in-class technologies, Spoonflower invested in a Durst Alpha with Dual-Roll option digital production printer. Running a strong e-commerce-based business, Spoonflower places high value on sustainability, as well as demands for speed, high quality and fast turnaround times.

Medtech testimonial about using XJet system to prevent breast cancer

04/04/2020

Guided MRI for cancer treatment

Marvel Medtech has developed an interactive MRI system called Solada. It is a robotic system which allows intervention inside the MRI imaging bore. Researchers have classified these kinds of robots as surgical computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing (CAD/CAM) robots, distinct from ‘surgical assistant robots’.

A CAD/CAM robot is a surgical guidance system which requires human intervention. For example, in case of a biopsy, despite the guidance of a robot the biopsy needle will still have to be probed by a physician.

Marvel Medtech calls Solada an interactive Magnetic Resonance Imaging Guided Intervention (iMR-IGI). The device enables real-time monitoring and guidance of probes for surgical procedures inside the MRI scanner.

For now, Marvel Medtech is focused on developing Solada for breast biopsy only. So far, the medical company has raised $2,500,000 which includes $2 million in grants from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and National Institutes of Health (NIH).

3D printed cryotherapy probe

Marvel Medtech acquired the Carmel 1400 machine because it is capable of 3D printing precise and complex ceramic objects with soluble supports. The Carmel 1400 machine will be used to 3D print a ceramic cryotherapy probe for the Solada robotic system. The probe will help destroy tumorous breast cancer cells.

Ray Harter, President of Marvel Medtech, explained, “The tools used inside an MRI scanner must be compatible with strict safety guidelines, and crucially, not disrupt image quality. Because they are one of the most electrically insulating materials, ceramics are an ideal material to achieve this.”

Harter continued, “However, we were unable to find a ceramic-based 3D printer able to accurately and cost effectively produce our ceramic probe. This is why we are adopting XJet’s Carmel 1400 solution.”e.”

Fight against cancer

3D printing in the medical field is having a significant impact, especially in the fight against cancer. Treatments that were limited before due to complex tools not being available are now more effective. Such examples include 3D printed bolus for administering medicine, full-body phantom and presurgical models.

Now, Xjet’s Carmel 3D printer will make another marvel in medicine achievable which once was perhaps improbable, if not impossible.

Danai said, “This application is a great example of how our unique ceramic 3D printing technology can enable manufacturers to overcome the limitations of traditional ceramic production. Indeed, we believe that XJet NPJ opens the door for the invention and production of many new products and tools to answer some of mankind’s biggest challenges, and we’re excited to see how it will impact our lives in the future.”

Metal 3D Printing Services for COVID-19 Supplies

03/04/2020

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