Overview
Description
BASF Ultrafuse® is an innovative filament to produce stainless steel parts from existing FDM desktop 3D printers.
It is designed for ultimate ease of handling on conventional Fused Filament Fabrication 3D printers. BASF Ultrafuse® combines greater freedom of design with a lower total cost of ownership – printing metal parts easier, faster and affordable. Parts printed with Ultrafuse® obtain their final properties, including hardness and strength, through the catalytic debinding and sintering process. The catalytic debinding technology was developed and introduced by BASF and has emerged as the industry standard.
Benefits At-A-Glance
- Easy and affordable metal 3D printing
- Fast material exchange and easy handling
- For all open source FFF printers
- Produces parts of stainless-steel 316L metal
- Uniform particle distribution enhances mechanical properties
- High flexibility of filament enables successful printing in any FFF printers
- Compatible with both Bowden and direct drive extruders
Example Applications
- Tooling
- Jigs and fixtures
- Functional prototypes
- Small series production
Documentation
Everything You Need To Know For Successful Prints With BASF Ultrafuse® 316L
Why Use BASF Ultrafuse?
Ultrafuse® has a much lower start up cost to print functional metal parts. Due to this material being designed to run on a wide range of commercial FFF machines, the machine requirements come with a much smaller price tag than traditional metal additive machines. For example, DMLS (Direct metal laser sintering) machines can start at the $600,000 price range.
Metal filament opens many part possibilities that only additive can access. Some of these possibilities include weight reduction, part features that aren’t possible with subtractive manufacturing, and low-cost small batch production.
One other great feature of metal additive is that these parts can be manipulated in their green state while they are soft before sintering. After sinter, these parts behave/machine the same as a stock piece of 316L / 17-4PH.
What's It Made Of?
Ultrafuse® is 90% stainless steel powder by weight in the filament form. This metal powder is combined and mixed with the polymers Polyacetal and Polyolefin. This combination of materials is important so the material can be run on a wide range of commercial FFF machines.
Sample Print Gallery
3D Printer Requirements
BASF Ultrafuse was created to run on a wide range of commercial FFF machines. Here are the requirements for a printer to run these filaments.
- Heated Bed
- Bed Temperature between 100-120C
- Extruder Temperature
- 240C minimum
- Bowden or Direct Drive Machine
- This material is both flexible and stiff. As a result, it can run on Bowden or Direct Drive machines.
- Enclosure
- An enclosure is highly recommended. This will help with layer adhesion. Layer separation is not fixable with this material due to the sintering process. If parts have separated layers, they will not sinter correctly.
- Hardened Nozzle
- While you can print with a non-hardened nozzle. It is not recommended. Small metal particles in the material will cause faster wear of non-hardened nozzles.
Printing Instructions
For detailed printing instructions, please refer to this User Guidelines document.
Keep in mind that parts will shrink anisotropically during the debinding and sintering process, so you'll want to scale your parts up in your slicing software as follows:
- X and Y: Scale by +119.82%
- Z: Scale by +126.10%
Important update: Ultimaker Cura v5.0 introduces improved support for BASF Ultrafuse, making it easier than ever to print metal parts with your Ultimaker 3D printer. Check out our Ultimaker Cura 5.0 Overview video for details.
Processing Instructions
For detailed instructions for the debinding and sintering process, refer to this Process Guidelines document.
Refer to the BASF Ultrafuse Processing Ticket page for details about the process for outsourcing the debinding and sintering of your parts.
