Concept to high-volume production of validated 3D printed medical devices in weeks

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, so did an urgent need for large supplies of personal protective equipment (PPE) for healthcare providers and nasopharyngeal swabs for COVID-19 testing. Supply chain disruptions immediately followed due to complicated supply chains with overwhelmed suppliers and difficult-to-source components. A reliance on a few vendors, instead of multiple supplier sources, and enormous product demand made it difficult for healthcare providers to secure inventory and layered on additional challenges.

Multi-purpose resin with optimum toughness and processing speed.

Download the technical datasheet for Ultracur3D^® ST 45 B.

One hundred parts produced within 24 hours on a single Origin One, at a fraction of the cost of traditional manufacturing.

Origin^® One features several integrated cameras for computer vision and capturing temperature data in the IR range; additional sensors measure other environmental conditions during the print process.

Senior mechanical design engineer Matt Miyamoto designed camera mounts for CNC machining out of black ABS plastic. A compound angle meant that the part could only be machined by a 5-axis CNC (or on a 3-axis CNC with multiple setups), which made the parts expensive to machine at low or high volumes. Matt turned to Origin’s solution to achieve the quality and throughput required.

Producing Lightweight, Durable Robot Parts on Stratasys Origin One

Ghost Robotics™ produces four-legged autonomous unmanned robots with all-terrain stability that can operate in almost any environment. These quadruped robots are size-scalable, ultra-agile, high-endurance, and easy to program. Simple mechanical systems increase the robots’ durability, agility, and endurance. The robots’ modular design supports the efficient field swapping of any sub-assembly.

Challenge

Ghost Robotics needed to produce lightweight, durable parts, with a cosmetic surface finish, for its Spirit™ Series robot.

• The team needed to stay agile, shipping units to customers while maintaining the ability to iterate designs based on customers’ feedback.
• Injection molded parts and CNC machined parts were cost-prohibitive, had long lead times, and could not be easily iterated on.
• The company considered other 3D printing methods as a solution, but the parts weren’t isotropic the mechanical properties weren’t strong enough; and the surface quality was too rough for the parts to be given to customers.