DLS production of denture pieces with Dentsply Sirona’s new material [Image: Carbon]

It’s another big day for Carbon with two new announcements set to expand its Digital Light Synthesis technology.

Carbon x Protolabs

Just a month after announcing availability via digital manufacturing platform Xometry, Carbon has expanded availability with Protolabs.

Protolabs is always on the lookout to broaden its offerings for its customers, including in production-grade additive manufacturing. The company already 3D prints more than 100,000 customer components on a monthly basis, currently using six 3D printing processes.

The digital manufacturer works with a huge range of customers, from the industrial to the highly artistic. Bringing more options in-house is a strong move to keep those customers coming back — and to attract even more who might suddenly find their designs makeable.

“We recognize that market demand for additive manufacturing has moved beyond prototyping and is being leveraged to create fully functional parts at much larger scale,” said Greg Thompson, Protolabs’ global product manager for 3D printing. “We are committed to supporting that demand in a technology-agnostic manner so that our customers get the best possible parts from the best possible 3D printing technology.”

That tech-agnosticism is serving them well. In a conversation last year, Thompson told us that the company was seeing expanding demand for production-level additive manufacturing. Bringing in more technology options is ensuring the Protolabs team are quite literally well-equipped for an even wider variety of customer requests.

From Carbon’s perspective, having DLS available via Protolabs is also a strong statement. As Co-Founder and CCO Phil DeSimone notes, Protolabs is “a key player in the industry” and Carbon is “proud to partner” with them.

Carbon x Dentsply Sirona

[Image: Carbon]

Carbon is also announcing the launch of a new digital print denture workflow and material system with Dentsply Sirona.

Digital dentistry is a major focus today in 3D printing, and Carbon is certainly no exception. DLS has proven very well-suited for a variety of dental uses. Early this year, Carbon introduced a swath of announcements tied in to the dental industry, so today’s news isn’t necessarily a surprise so much as a logical next step.

The company has partnered with leading dental product and technology company Dentsply Sirona for material and workflow.

Among Carbon’s February dental announcements was support for Dentsply’s Premium Denture Resin — and now the company offers “the only platform validated for Dentsply Sirona’s Lucitone Digital Print Denture materials.”

The announcement explains:

“The new Dentsply Sirona 3D printed workflow with Carbon includes five core material system products: Lucitone Digital Print 3D Denture Resin, IPN 3D Digital Denture Teeth, Lucitone Digital Try-in 3D Trial Placement Resin, Lucitone Digital Fuse 3-Step system, and the Lab Speedcure Processing Unit. This material and equipment system is used as part of a complete digital print workflow, that includes cloud-based traceable printing for each denture, taking digitally printed dentures to a whole new level.”

It’s one thing to introduce a material intended for a particular application; it’s another thing entirely to provide an entire end-to-end workflow for using that material appropriately. A tool is generally only as good as its user, and this partnership is working to ensure that the full workflow is comprehensive — and comprehensible — for laboratory efficiency.

Importantly, the Lucitone Digital Print Denture received FDA clearance in late August. Any medical or dental application needs to keep an eye on regulation, and this introduction has done its due diligence. Availability is slated for this month in the US via early access partners, and in the first quarter of 2020 for wider US availability for all Carbon M-Series users. International release dates have not been noted yet; “Due to the different approval and registration times, not all technologies and products are immediately available in all countries.”

Via Carbon