SOLUTONS

UR(CLIP) or MJP - Competition for Speed, Surface and Casting

White wax machine is a new type of photosensitive resin continuous 3D printer. White wax combines the ease of casting of wax and the ease of molding of resin. At the same time, the printing turnover rate is extremely high and the surface is very smooth, which provides a strong guarantee for the mass production of jewelry 3D printing.

 


 

Manufacturing Process

 

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Comparison of 3D Printing White Wax Machine and Purple Wax Machine for Jewelry Industry

There are many 3D printing technologies used in jewelry manufacturing, but the most mature technology and the most widely used are DLP photocuring 3D printing technology and on-demand jet 3D printing technology. They use different materials. The former is castable white wax resin, and the latter is castable purple wax. The factories are commonly called white wax machine and purple wax machine.

Purple wax machine is a 3D printing technology that has been used in jewelry production for a long time. Because of its easy casting and no need to add support skills, it has been well used, but because of its low printing efficiency, the surface is not smooth enough, and the material It is widely criticized for its low strength and other characteristics. The white wax machine is a new type of photosensitive resin continuous 3D printer, named because the material uses a mixture of high content wax and photosensitive resin, and it turns white after post-processing. White wax combines the ease of casting of wax and the ease of molding of resin, and has unique advantages, providing technical support for the mass production of jewelry. This article will compare these two 3D printers from different angles. The purple wax machine involved in the comparison here is the 3D printer MJP 2500W and wax produced by 3D Systems in the United States, the 3D printer WaxJet 400 and wax FFWJ1100/FFMS3100 produced by FlashForge in China, and the white wax machine is EnvisionTec in Germany (now ETEC brand in the United States) The 3D printers Envision One and Pewter Easy Cast 2.0C, China TotusTec Company produces 3D printers 3D Plus 4KL150UR and Pewter CW2000 series.

Surface Texture and Detail Rendering

The MJP multi-nozzle inkjet 3D printing technology adopted by the purple wax machine is to use piezoelectric jetting to stack the wax casting material layer by layer. Due to the influence of mechanical movement and the size of the sprayed droplets, the surface is granular, and the size of the particles directly affects the The effect of the surface, the surface will show serious jagged circles and accumulation lines. At the same time, due to the large droplet particles, there will be spillovers at the depressions, boundaries, and contours, which will become blurred and cannot restore details.

The white wax machine adopts DLP continuous 3D printing technology, which uses digital light processing technology to project high-resolution images onto the printing material, thereby curing layer by layer. The size of a single pixel directly affects the surface accuracy. The 4K resolution projection technology can reduce the pixel to 30μm, and the boundary of the pixel can be optimized by grayscale to eliminate jaggies. The latest white wax machine can reduce the layer thickness to 10μm, approximately continuous. The process of stretching can make the vertical direction particularly smooth.

 

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Surface texture comparison between purple wax and white wax

 

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Comparison of details of purple wax and white wax

 

Naterial Strength and Casting Effect

Purple wax is mainly composed of polyethylene glycol wax, higher fatty alcohol, tackifier and toughening agent, etc. It is a good casting material, but its hardness, toughness and tensile strength are low, and it is not suitable for printing particularly small The structure is also prone to brittle fracture in a lower temperature environment and transportation. White wax is mainly composed of low temperature wax, resin, photoinitiator, etc. It combines the advantages of easy casting of wax and high strength and high toughness of resin, which relieves the restriction on design and greatly reduces the requirements on the environment.

 

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White wax casting effect display

 

Print Speed and Turnaround Efficiency

The purple wax machine has a large layout and can arrange many parts at a time, but due to the long movement time in each direction, the printing speed is not fast. It takes 7-10 hours to print a normal ring full page, and the turnaround efficiency is low. The layout of the white wax machine can be adjusted as needed. There is almost no time for mechanical movement. The efficiency of single-page printing is very high. It takes 1-1.5 hours to print a full-page ordinary ring, and only 2 hours for those who have extreme requirements on the surface. The turnover efficiency Huge improvements.

 

  Purple Wax Printer(MJP 2500W) White Wax Printer(4KL150UR)
Size 290×210mm 146×82mm
Layer Thickness 16μm 10μm/25μm
Printing Speed 4mm/h 18-25mm/h
Turnover Efficiency 7-10 hours/file 1.2-2 hours/file

 

Costing and Economics

Considering the cost of equipment and materials, the price of purple wax machine is much higher than that of white wax machine. In addition, the nozzles of the purple wax machine need to be updated twice every two years, and the optical and mechanical life of the white wax machine is more than 100,000 hours, and the life of the light source is at least 20,000 hours. The stability of the nozzle of purple wax directly affects whether continuous production is possible, which is also a factor that users must consider.

 

  Purple Wax Printer(MJP 2500W) White Wax Printer(4KL150UR)
Equipment Quotation 65,000 USD 43,000USD
Material Price 600 USD/kg 275 USD/group
Comprehensive Cost of Materials 0.6 USD/g 0.3 USD/g

 

Epilogue

Although the purple wax machine and the white wax machine have their own advantages and disadvantages, with the optimization and upgrading of the white wax machine, the surface advantages, precision advantages, efficiency advantages, etc., make the white wax machine become the focus of the market again. The new type of white wax not only meets the characteristics of light curing, but also meets the requirements of low expansion rate and low residual amount. It is a material that can completely replace traditional casting wax. The great improvement of casting characteristics also simplifies the workload of subsequent manual mold execution. In addition to being used for pattern making, forward-looking jewelers use the white wax machine for direct mass production. This method not only simplifies the process, but can even completely eliminate the mold-opening wax room and become a productivity tool for jewelry factories.

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