Demonstrations of Black and White PA-12 Antistatic Performance

Not scientific, despite the lab coats. Still, a look at how the property differences go beyond appearance.

In a recent post, I described the antistatic properties of new black PA-12 nylon for selective laser sintering (SLS) additive manufacturing machines from EOS. Material developer ALM – Advanced Laser Materials set out to create a PA-12 for SLS that is inherently black and needs no dye, and along the way created a material with a set of properties not found in any other material. As Lifestyle Additive Manufacturing discovered in its evaluation of the material, this is a Class II biocompatible material that also has strong antistatic properties. That combination presents various opportunities related to medical device component production. Read more.

The video above is a follow-up to that post. Lifestyle Additive operations director Nathan Stevens conceived of multiple visual demonstrations to show the antistatic difference. To be sure, these are not scientific tests (the Big Kahuna frisbee is not lab-calibrated), but they do make clear the extent to which these two PA-12 versions differ in far more than color. Indeed, established SLS users likely have been routinely experiencing the conventional PA-12’s static without identifying the effect as such. As Stevens shows with the shop vacuum, static cling is the reason the white SLS is so apt to be sticky during cleanup. The different behavior of the black material signals an expanded range of application.