Due to some customers we are working with, we need to find PEEK resin that might be printable with Formlabs2…Does anybody know something about where we can find this resin???
There is no such thing. Some FDMs might be able to do PEEK. Which properties of PEEK are critical to the application? If you need temperature resistance, High Temp might work but it is still lower than PEEK. Standard resins have a Young’s modulus of 2.8 GPa compared to 3.6 GPa for PEEK. If you need toughness then the Tough resin might be a candidate. PEEK is a “high performing” plastic so it is hard to mimic all of its properties.
maybe it is more realistic to print peek with the new Fuse 1: selective laser melting with peek powder?
did someone tried this yet at Formlabs development department?
this would be a great product in dental industry because Peek has not only very interesting technical specifications but also very biocompatible with nearly no water absorption and antibacterial in intra oral environment
we can buy dental peek blocks for Cadcam in dental industry or you can buy industrial peek
Also peek powder :
https://www.solvay.com/en/markets-and-products/products/detail.html?productId=1874&productName=KetaSpire®+KT-810
At page 113 in the pdf on the Solvay website (download page of documentation on medical peek) you can find information on laserwelding of peek:
https://www.solvay.com/en/markets-and-products/products/detail.html?productId=1874&productName=KetaSpire®+KT-810
I would bet the main issue with PEEK in an SLS printer is temperature which is ~150% higher than Nylon. knowing that temperature is a difficult thing to manage in this kind of machines I can see is being a blocker for the Fuse.
Also PEEK is one of the most expensive plastics in the world, and when you see how much Nylon for SLS machines cost when compared to the price per m^3 of standard nylon, I can’t imagine the price of PEEK powder !
I agree of course that it would be great to be able to print PEEK on the Fuse but I keep realistic expectations. In the meantime there are 3D printing services that do offer PEEK sls printing.
Laser sintered PEEK/Delrin will likely never be bio compatible (at least approved) because it’s porous due to the process.
Sintering may not make water tight parts but it’s close.
A bit out of topic but I’m curious. I’m no doctor but I’ve worked as a mechanical designer for a medical implants company : wouldn’t some porosity actually help oseointegration, provided the whole printing process is sterile ?
we use a lot of slm structures in dental technology: particular titanium.
Peek is used in molding technic or cadcam milling but as mentioned before it is quite expensive for Cadcam milling process because of huge loss of material.
Printing might solve this issue?
Is there a lot of loss of material during slm process like the print process in fuse 1?
Major problem of slm print process is that it is not detailed enough for some particular products like fixed screw retained teeth structures on implants: the implant connections are milled after the slm technic in Cam system.
The slm structure is designed in extra rough surface to have ideal connection with PMMA resin teeth polymerized on the internal slm structure. This is an advantage of printing compared to milling.
You have to fill the whole XY surface area with resin up to the Z height of your part with powder in order to print. All powder that isn’t sintered is considered recycled powder and it is recommended to run a print with a maximum of X% of recycled powder while the rest is new power. From what I understand this whole powder management process is part of the other $10k of “accessories” for the Fuse. It is difficult to assess how much material is lost but I think it will be much much less than with milling… However, even if you loose only 5% of powder it’ll still be cheaper to loose 50% of the volume during milling due to the raw nylon being so much cheaper than powder… it all comes down to machine cost, production volumes and lead-times which is where SLS shines.
Thanks for the input, I was indeed thinking about titanium SLM, I actually worked closely with the surface finish processes involved in the production of dental implants as well so I can confirm that manufacturers do go to insane lengths to get that porous surface post-machining. The first company to successfully print titanium with <5nm grains and much smaller laser points will be leader in no time.
Interesting question, and a bit off topic on my part.
My recent brush with PEEK has me reeling at both price and the limited configurations of sheet and plate stock available.
I have a customer that I build aluminum RF housings for, and one in particular needed a cover; the original looked to be machined out of Ultem 1000 (black). I ended up printing some samples on my Form 2 out of High Temp, and these were tested, and my opinion was that they were too brittle to meet service life. There were also some covers printed out of Ultem, but these were not all that impressive, and were quite expensive as well.
The customer decided that we would be better off with Ultem, so I ended up machining these, though I wonder if a short fiber glass (similar to Rigid) version of High Temp would have worked.
At any rate, I found a “reasonably” priced source for Ultem, but the only PEEK that I ever machined was for a medical company, some 20 years ago.
I haven’t tried this, but I have interest in taking the printed part for say, Rigid, which I just received last week, and “painting” it with some, thinned, leftover Tough or Flexible, and post curing it under UV, just to give it a bit more impact resistance. Interestingly enough, I would see a similar finishing process as useful for Fuse 1 parts, to improve cosmetics of the surface, rather than a paint.
Have you thought about electroplating? Just looking into this now but it’s an interesting soloution on adding mechanical properties to a printed part…