Large Volume, Multi-material High Speed Sintering Machine

Additive Manufacturing (aka industrial 3D Printing) technologies have been widely recognised as extremely important for the reshaping, re-shoring and sustainable growth of UK manufacturing. The lack of process speed has been cited as the greatest inhibitor to growth of Additive Manufacturing, identifying a need for speed improvement by 4-10X over today's technologies.

High Speed Sintering (http://www.lboro.ac.uk/enterprise/hss/) is an Additive Manufacturing process invented under EPSRC funded research with granted patents globally. High Speed Sintering (HSS) has the potential to be the world's first Additive Manufacturing process that is capable of producing robust polymer parts at a production rate quicker than 1 second per part and at a cost that is comparable with today's high volume manufacturing processes such as injection moulding. Additionally, HSS has the potential to create multi-material parts in a scalable manner. In this project we propose to create the world's first HSS machine capable of high part throughput and multi-materials and thus open up the possibility for a vast range of hitherto impossible research of international significance to be undertaken.