3D Screen Printing

The transition from manufacturing prototype plastoc parts to production parts involves significant investment, particularly with injection moulding where high tooling and design costs require high-volume production to be economically viable. While additive manufacturing reduces design risk it is generally unsuitable for production due to limited materials, material performance and time-consuming post processing. Eliminating this transitional gap has the potential to transform the manufacture of low-volume products, accelerating time to market, reducing cost, and reducing risk, all factors critical to product success and barriers to entry. This proof-of-concept project will develop a new solution called 3D Screen Printing (3DSP), invented specifically for runs of 1 to 10,000 pieces. The 3DSP method has many of the benefits of the injection moulding state of the art, such as part resolution, fully homogeneous parts and high accuracy, without any tooling and vastly increased speed over other additive technologies. 3DPS has the potential to reduce prototype production time to minutes from hours, combining the design freedom of additive manufactuing with the part quality of injection moulding.