Nov 21 2012
Optomec announced today that it will showcase Aerosol Jet systems for 3D printed electronics at the Defense Manufacturing Conference (DMC) being held at the Marriott Orlando World Center in Orlando, FL from November 26-29, 2012. Optomec will be located in booth #803. Bill Macy, Application Development Lead at Stratasys (NASDAQ: SSYS), and Ken Vartanian, Marketing Director at Optomec, will deliver a joint presentation in the “Printed Electronics - Bringing New Solutions to DoD Applications” Track at 1:50 pm on Monday, November 26.
The presentation, “Capability Assessment of Hybrid Components Utilizing Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) and Aerosol Jet Technologies,” highlights how Stratasys, Optomec and Aurora Flight Sciences collaborated on a project to demonstrate how these technologies might be combined to print electronic structures including antennas, strain gauges, a power circuit, and a signal circuit directly onto the surface of a Stratasys 3D Printed wing structure. The presentation will explain the capabilities of the combined technologies, unique integration requirements, and current challenges. FDM is an additive manufacturing process that can build three dimensional parts out of high strength thermal plastics directly from a Computer Aided Design (CAD) model. Aerosol Jet is an additive manufacturing process that can deposit conductive inks and other electronic materials onto a wide variety of substrates including 3D surfaces. The combination of these two technologies has the potential to offer designers new options to produce highly integrated designs resulting smaller, lighter weight products.
The unique ability of Aerosol Jet systems to print fine line conformal circuitry on non planar surfaces is a key enabler for fully printed electronics on 3D surfaces. The relatively large stand-off, up to 5mm from the nozzle tip to the substrate, and high velocity particle stream enable the Aerosol Jet material deposition head to print on surfaces with inclines of up to 22.5 degrees without tilting the head. For a video demonstration of the UAV smart structure, click here.
DMC is the premier Defense Manufacturing and Industrial Base Conference in the country. Over 1,000 attendees are expected from the DOD, Services, large and small businesses, contractors, Civilian Agencies and Academia. This year’s conference will feature over 25 specialized Concurrent Sessions devoted to important manufacturing science, technology, engineering and business process topics.
Optomec is a privately-held, rapidly growing supplier of Additive Manufacturing systems. These solutions utilize Optomec’s patented Aerosol Jet Printed Electronics technology and LENS Printed Metal technology to reduce costs and improve performance. Together, these unique 2D and 3D printing solutions work with the broadest spectrum of functional materials, ranging from electronic inks to structural metals and even biological matter. Optomec has more than 150 marquee customers around the world, targeting production applications in the Electronics, Energy, Life Sciences and Aerospace industries.