Nylon 12 Case Study

Nylon 11 and 12 are dominant in laser sintering for 3D Printing, as well on the overall nylon market by weight (37%). For example, Boeing has already created over 10,000 separate laser sintered nylon 12 parts such as ducting and equipment housing for its various aircrafts The suppliers of nylon powdered materials for 3D printing are few, this is because the market is still relatively small and the powders need to be specially formulated to work on the available systems. Actually, 85% of nylon 12 for 3D printing market is made by Evonik. The process of developing the correct kind of powders is really expensive. Nylon 12 is used in both automotive and aerospace components, as well as jigs, tooling and fixtures. In addition, nylon 12 also finds
These is due to the increase diversification of the 3D printing industry, which has become evident on the last 5 years. Some sectors experienced strong increases such as the aerospace sector with a 2.5% increase. The aerospace industry was an early adopter of 3D printing and began to explore applications as soon as the technology was available for industrial production. Some sector leading firms such as Boeing or Airbus began to use polymer printed parts for non-structural production applications in the mid-90s. Polymers were the start of a strategic roadmap will end up with the use of SLS metal machines on this decade. Boeing has already produced tens of thousands of fully functional and flying parts, representing at the moment over 200 different parts on 16 different commercial and military
This sector typically produces parts in larger volumes than other sectors but the life cycle of their products are relatively short, with parts which are not functionally exigent. In this use cases, 3D printing accelerates product development by optimizing time to part by enabling rapid design iteration. Maybe the industry which is shifting the most nowadays from traditional manufacturing to 3D printing, is the dental industry. The dental industry is moving to digital by applying scanning tools, new software’s, and printing in 3D printers. As a use case Align Tecimologies manufactures 17 million unique Invisalign orthodontic aligners annually, and each one is produced by thermoforming sheet material over a unique pattern made by AM.

At last, I would like to also focus on the automotive industry, as it has invested from the very start in 3D printing machines for prototyping and rapid product development. Although the automotive industry has implemented 3D printing in all of its part design and testing, 3D printing faces a major problem in this industry as production volumes are normally too high for the existing technologies, and they are not able to compete with molding in traditional