The "Faberlab powered by Arburg" Additive Center was officially launched on March 2 as part of an open house event of Arburg. The center at Faberlab, service provider for industrial additive manufacturing, offers companies beyond the region the unique opportunity to familiarize themselves with additive machines from Arburg and innovatiQ in practical situations.

In Origgio in the Greater Milan, customers benefit from the close collaboration between Faberlab and Arburg and the expertise the two companies have pooled.

The knowledge surrounds not only the technology itself, but also every conceivable service related to industrial additive manufacturing and across the entire value chain from development to production, including rapid prototyping, component design, and also training.

The range of services on offer from the "Faberlab powered by Arburg" Additive Center is presented to the guests in detail during the opening ceremony.

Arburg is providing a freeformer 200-3X, a high-temperature freeformer 300-3X and an innovatiQ TiQ 5 printer with a large build chamber for processing high-performance thermoplastics. Ivan Panfiglio, manager for additive manufacturing in Italy, is the point of contact at Arburg for customers of this technology.

This pilot project is based on the Arburg Prototyping Center (APC), which the company operates at its headquarters in Lossburg as well as at its branches in the USA and China.

Now, customers can have benchmark components manufactured and materials qualified in Italy as well. Having strategically expanded the reach of its AM activities in this way, Arburg can now specifically meet local expectations and cater to the needs of the Italian market as a whole.

The opening of the "digital lab" was attended by a total of 118 guests. Eltek Spa, a customer of Arburg, presented a case history of products created on the Freeformer.

Expert from ARBURGadditive explains the potentials of Arburg Plastic Freeforming on the two freeformers directly.

Massimo Zanin, senior development engineer at Eltek Spa, remarked, "Eltek has around a hundred Arburg injection molding machines. For plastics processors like ourselves, it is important to have a system that can use the same plastics for prototyping as it does for the series product. Our prototypes should have more or less the same mechanical properties as the original. The Freeformer is the printer that best meets these requirements."

An Eltek product built entirely on the Freeformer has given research a boost. This concerns a rapid antibiogram, in other words a microbiological test procedure that allows the response of a bacterium to an antibiotic to be analyzed. A patient’s pathology can then be understood very quickly, saving lives.

Arburg stated that without compromise means that not only standard additive components but complex functional components as well can be produced as hard/soft combinations or with support material in the Center.

A wide range of original materials, material combinations and colors at high level of quality and stability are available for industrial scale production. Two of many examples are 3D printing using ABS for impact-resistant components with a high quality surface finish and the additive processing of SEBS, a highly elastic and soft TPE with good colorability and malleability. In Italy too, requirement for industrial additive manufacturing can now be met.