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Tuesday, January 27, 2026

3D Printing Information Briefs, January 3, 2026: F-15 Substitute Half, Ice Timber, & Extra – 3DPrint.com


Joyful New Yr! We’ve acquired an abbreviated 3D Printing Information Briefs for you at the moment, so we are able to all get pleasure from our vacation weekend however nonetheless sustain on the business’s information. First, in enterprise information, amsight has introduced a brand new strategic investor. Transferring on, a 3D printed substitute half helped put an F-15 again within the air means forward of schedule. Lastly, since winter has totally arrived within the U.S., we’ll finish with analysis out of Amsterdam about 3D printing ice timber and different buildings.

amsight Broadcasts Butterfly & Elephant as New Strategic Investor

Hamburg-based software program startup amsight has gained a robust strategic associate in GS1 Germany’s funding firm Butterfly & Elephant, which invested in amsight as a part of a Pre-Seed II financing spherical. The startup makes a speciality of data-driven high quality administration for industrial 3D printing, consolidating all related manufacturing knowledge inside a single software program. With its funding in amsight, Butterfly & Elephant is supporting the automation, digitalization, and standardization of AM, and joins amsight in its aim of advancing end-to-end traceability for 3D printed elements, along with digital product and course of knowledge primarily based on GS1 requirements. Collectively, the 2 will collaborate to develop options that enable corporations to doc and securely change necessary parameters throughout the manufacturing chain. amsight will use this infusion of capital to hurry up product growth, drive market entry in regulated industries, and increase its software program, particularly in compliance and knowledge standardization areas.

“We’re very happy to have gained Butterfly & Elephant as an investor who not solely gives capital, however above all brings deep strategic experience in standardization in addition to half identification and labeling. Collectively, we are going to elevate the change of digital manufacturing knowledge and traceability in industrial 3D printing to a brand new stage,” stated Dr.-Ing. Tim Wischeropp, CEO & Co-Founding father of amsight GmbH.

NAVAIR Helps Navy & Marine Corps with 3D Printed F-15 Substitute Half

To extend readiness in forward-deployed areas, the NAVAIR Additive Manufacturing workforce helps US Marine Corps and Navy maintainers with engineering assist, AM coaching, and technical knowledge. A latest instance is a cross-service collaboration wherein maintainers with Marine Plane Logistics Squadron 36 (MALS-36) and 18th Upkeep Group (18 MXG) used 3D printing to repair a right-hand cockpit cooling duct in a USAF F-15 Eagle fighter plane. Throughout a post-flight inspection at Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan, a crack was observed within the half, and maintainers initially determined to restore it with conventional processes, which might have saved the F-15 grounded for 3-4 months. However, after a session with a depot liaison engineer, they determined to make use of 3D printing to create a substitute as an alternative. 18 MXG maintainers printed two prototypes, however bumped into technical difficulties earlier than fabricating the ultimate element. As a result of MALS-36 had the identical printer, they reached out for assist, and two prototypes had been printed, delivered, and fit-checked in lower than 12 hours—placing the F-15 again within the air months forward of schedule. Moreover, after analyzing the Air Pressure’s technical knowledge bundle, the Marines got here up with a greater design for the half that lowered print time by two hours.

“Right here was a state of affairs the place a multi-million greenback plane was going to be sidelined for months because of the lack of an element within the provide system. The Air Pressure’s proactive, forward-leaning maintainers sought and obtained approval to restore the half utilizing their on-site AM functionality. 18 MXG was backstopped by MALS-36’s AM functionality and so they even acquired a greater and faster AM design out of the collaboration,” stated Theodore Gronda, NAVAIR Additive Manufacturing Program Supervisor. “This was actually a glowing instance of a ‘One Workforce, One Battle’ effort.”

3D Printing Ice Christmas Timber with Evaporative Cooling in Vacuum

3D Printing Information Briefs, January 3, 2026: F-15 Substitute Half, Ice Timber, & Extra – 3DPrint.com

Determine 1: {Photograph} of a Christmas tree made solely from 3D printed ice. The construction is fabricated utilizing a 16 µm liquid jet mounted on a business 3D printer inside a vacuum chamber. The tree has a peak of roughly 8 cm and a base diameter of about 6 cm, with branches and positive options faithfully reproduced from the digital mannequin with none supporting materials or exterior cooling. The slight translucency and clean surfaces exhibit the optical high quality of the ice and the soundness of the evaporative-cooling printing course of.

A trio of researchers from the Institute of Physics (IOP) on the College of Amsterdam used evaporative cooling to 3D print freeform ice buildings inside a vacuum chamber. Analysis into ice 3D printing remains to be pretty restricted, but when correctly harnessed, it might be very helpful for intricate tissue engineering scaffolds, microfluidic gadgets, casting templates, and even development. Different approaches have used cryogenic refrigeration or substrate cooling to stabilize stable water, however that is costly, and particular infrastructure and gear is required. IOP researchers Menno Demmenie, Stefan Kooij, and Daniel Bonn went a unique route, housing a ROOK MK1 business 3D printer inside a clear acrylic vacuum chamber. They changed the thermoplastic extruder with a customized nozzle mount, pushed by a Excessive-Efficiency Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) pump to eject a jet of water that breaks into droplets which freeze, through evaporative cooling, onto the substrate to type a construction; solely a tiny little bit of water must evaporate to induce freezing. What’s very attention-grabbing is that the low ambient pressures on the moon and Mars are inside the mandatory vary for the freezing mechanism. So in concept, water-based or particle-laden jets may immediately print buildings in these punishing environments with out having to make use of further cooling techniques. Plus, ice blended with regolith or sand may make a robust composite materials for constructing radiation shielding or protecting buildings off-planet.

“A micrometer-sized water jet is used to 3D print inside a vacuum chamber. The lowered ambient stress results in speedy evaporation of the extruded water, extracting latent warmth, and rapidly cooling the water nicely beneath 0 °C. As soon as deposited, the water freezes nearly instantaneously into steady ice buildings. We exhibit high-fidelity printing of complicated geometries (Christmas timber, cones, vertical pillars, and free-standing zigzag buildings) with out cryogenic infrastructure, supporting supplies, or exterior refrigeration. This method immediately visualizes elementary thermodynamic ideas—latent warmth, evaporative cooling, and pressure-dependent section transitions—whereas providing a comparatively easy and scalable platform for ice-templated microfluidics and tissue engineering, and even extraterrestrial 3D printing,” the workforce defined within the summary of their paper.



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