Prima Additive, Materialise collaborate to advance efficiency and process control of AM systems

Prima Additive, a business unit of Prima Industrie Group, and Materialise, a provider of 3D Printing software and services, are intensifying their collaboration in the optimization of metal additive manufacturing systems.

The collaboration between the two companies has led to the optimization of the Print Genius 150, the additive manufacturing system by Prima Additive with Powder Bed Fusion technology featuring two lasers working on the same area. On this machine Prima Additive has integrated Materialise's MCP(Materialise Control Platform) hardware control to obtain real-time control functions and a streamlined combination with external systems to assist the process, such as monitoring and control systems.

MCP is a machine-embedded hardware- and software-driven platform for advanced control of laser-based 3D printing processes. The MCP provides all the tools required for an easy-to-use, open and configurable system to connect, control and monitor all process related hardware (laser, scanhead, and dynamic focus). It is equipped with OPC ua and REST API communication protocols.

The collaboration has also led to the development of a laser Workload Balancing algorithm that allows to exploit the two lasers to the maximum and in a balanced way, optimizing their workload.