3D printing ensures high quality in dental prosthesis production // Producing metal dental prostheses eight times faster
Ditzingen/Cologne, 09 March 2023 – The high-tech company TRUMPF is showing the new TruPrint 1000 at the world’s leading dental trade show IDS. “This 3D printer is the fastest machine on the dental market. With better quality, the TruPrint 1000 manufactures at a higher speed. In the dual-laser version, the machine is about eight times faster than conventional processes such as milling,” says Reinhard Sroka, an expert in metal 3D printing of dental prostheses at TRUMPF. The high-tech company is the market leader in Europe for 3D printers for the dental industry. In addition to Germany, important sales markets include France, Italy, and Spain. “3D printing is the ideal manufacturing method for the dental industry. Dental prostheses are always custom-made. At the same time, companies must produce large quantities of them. This is where our 3D printers come into their own,” says Sroka.
Especially in the preform version, the TruPrint 1000 is far superior to the production of metallic dentures using conventional methods. A preform is a standardized, conventionally manufactured substructure onto which the 3D printer prints an individual mold made of a chrome-cobalt alloy or titanium. This creates so-called abutments, for example, which later support dental crowns. “Only TRUMPF offers this technology. With Preform, 3D printing will replace conventional manufacturing in the dental industry in the long term,” says Sroka.
Mass production with 3D printing
Thanks to its compact design, the TruPrint 1000 is ideally suited for dental labs. At just around 80 centimeters wide, the machine takes up very little space, making it easy to deliver and set up through the door. Users can also have several units producing side by side in parallel in small laboratories and speed up their production even further. The construction plates on which the dental prosthesis is created change automatically up to four times. This makes it possible to produce metal dentures overnight.
One size larger than the TruPrint 1000 is the TruPrint 2000, which is designed for the mass production of so-called RPDs (“removable partial dentures”). These are partial dentures that the patient can insert and remove independently. With an optimized process, the TruPrint 2000 can print up to 100 RPDs in 24 hours. This high speed lowers manufacturing costs. “This is important because dental labs need to sell these partial dentures primarily at a low price,” says Sroka. With its small beam diameter of only 55 µm, the laser of the TruPrint 2000 ensures very high surface quality and attention to detail. The surface of the RPDs, therefore, feels very smooth, and dental labs save time on manual finishing.
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