Is black PA-12 nylon material for selective laser sintering (SLS) additive manufacturing more conducive to fine-detail precision than the conventional material? It seems the answer is yes.
I’ve spent time with contract manufacturer and product development specialist Lifestyle Additive in Tucson, Arizona, as the team here experiments with black PA-12 nylon material developed by Advanced Laser Materials (ALM) for SLS machines from EOS.
The new material represents a new possibility. Conventional SLS nylon is white. Another color comes either from dying the part, or from an additive mixed in with the powder. The new ALM material features the black color as an inherent property of the powder.
Lifestyle is learning the processing parameters for building with this material. And more: The company is discovering that black nylon has special functional properties that go beyond the aesthetics.
Precision is part of the black magic: The black material is proving more capable for achieving fine-detail features than the conventional white nylon. It is not that one material is capable of tolerance the other is not. It is more that the new material allows the team to arrive at a precise process faster, with fewer of the iterative adjustments to design, orientation or parameters needed to get to the process that can deliver a needed precise feature.
In the video above, I discuss the material, Lifestyle’s experimentation, and how the team is seeing the precision difference.
Potentially, there is yet another unexpected functional advantage of black SLS nylon beyond this precision difference. Lifestyle is conducting tests to validate and measure another performance difference the team has observed. If those tests confirm the observed effect, I believe I will have a chance to report on this in a future post, so stay tuned.
