Carbon, a leading product development and manufacturing technology company, has recently announced the launch of its EPU Pro platform, marking a significant advancement in 3D printing materials that will enhance performance, usability, production and sustainability. Debuted at Formnext, the premier additive manufacturing event, this new elastomer family joins Carbon’s robust material portfolio and delivers the high performance that Carbon’s proprietary dual-cure resins are known for while improving usability for production by introducing a dual-cure resin that comes in a single container.
When used in tandem with Carbon Design Engine, customers can tune their product for performance, protection, and comfort, with multizonal lattices, generating mechanical responses more precise than traditional foams. Additionally, with Carbon Custom Production Software, users can fully deliver on additive manufacturing’s vision of enabling mass customization at scale.
“We continue to lead the way in additive manufacturing with our unique stack of in-house material science, software, and hardware development, as we work with some of the most well-known brands in the world to deliver on 3D-printing’s unique capabilities,” said Jason Rolland, SVP of Materials at Carbon. “The EPU Pro platform offers mechanical properties and novel haptics that are suitable for a wide variety of high-performance applications, custom colors, and tunable material stiffnesses. This allows us to continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible with our brand partners.”
Pushing the Boundaries of Material Science
The EPU Pro platform will extend Carbon’s range of elastomeric offerings, and can also incorporate foaming agents to introduce novel haptics, creating a suede-like touch. The material’s enhanced properties enable greater design freedom for curvatures and delicate structures, opening new possibilities for product designers and manufacturers.
EPU Pro builds upon Carbon’s already outstanding portfolio of premium elastomers, including energy-damping EPU 45 and energy-returning bio-derived EPU 46. Carbon rigorously tests these materials to improve their ability to meet the material performance and production reliability needed to mass produce across multiple high-performance applications.
Empowering Mass Customization
Carbon’s recent launch of Custom Production Software enables automated design and project preparation for customized or personalized products at scale. This technology, coupled with Carbon’s Design Engine and Lattice Search tool, is intended by Carbon to empower designers to create more precisely tuned, high-performance products with multi-zonal lattices in varying densities.
“Our custom One-to-One saddle represents a significant leap forward in cycling innovation,” said Giovanni Fogal, Brand Director from fizik. “By leveraging Carbon Custom Production Software, we can now offer a custom saddle to cyclists that truly responds to their individual riding needs. The Carbon platform allows us to deliver unprecedented levels of personalization and comfort, along with the world-class performance fizik is known for.”
Carbon’s vertically integrated approach, combining its material science, software development, and hardware engineering, provides its customers with the opportunity to push the boundaries of product design and bring radically better products to market, in less time.
