INNOVATIVE BUILD ENVELOPE DESIGN TO IMPROVE UNPACKING PROSESS

Some 3D printing technology works by printing 2D layers of a given thickness one on top of another. For every layer, a uniform layer of powder is placed in the whole printer’s build bed, and agents are placed at the specific points which are willing to be melted to form the part. Once the job is finished, it requires several hours to cool down (depending on the job’s height), so an external natural cooling unit may be used to allow external cooling, releasing the build unit during the cooling hours. The workflow when using the natural cooling unit consists in transferring the job from the build unit to the natural cooling unit just after the printing, letting the job cool down in the unit during the required hours and doing the unpack directly from the natural cooling unit. To be able to perform this workflow without having an impact on the part quality metrics of the printed parts, it is necessary to print a build envelope around the parts during the printing process. This envelope is designed with the purpose of reducing to the minimum the movement of the powder and the job parts when doing the extract operation, while also controlling the thermal stability of the printed job. However, during the unpack operation the user needs to break the envelope, so he can properly extract the powder and the parts. To avoid this, we propose a workflow which prints the build envelope’s top cover slightly separated from the rest of the envelope, allowing an easier unpack and preserving the part quality