The LITHOMAN Long Grain. Source: manroland Goss
| Page Rate | Example | |
|---|---|---|
| Web Offset Press | 4M/hr | LITHOMAN Long Grain |
| Sheef-Fed Offset Press | 21K/hr | Heidelberg Speedmaster XL 106 |
| Web Digital Press | 27k/hr | HP PageWide Advantage 2200 |
| Sheet-Fed Digital Press | 18K/hr | Xerox Baltoro HF |
| Typical Office Laserjet | 2.1K/hr |
Injection Molding
The Sumitomo Demag El-Exis SP - molding 216K bottle caps per hour (1.9k cycles / hour)
What's the point?
- Printing may be the world's fastest manufacturing technology (although I know somebody is going to suggest some clever counter-point:-)
- Being able to parallelize provides huge productivity gains.
- The LITHOMAN referenced above produces 4M sheets / hour, but that's at 50K cylinder revs/hour and 80 sheets per rev.
- The injection molding machine is about 10x faster than one of the world's fastest sheet-fed offset presses, but only because it makes 96 caps per cycle. Otherwise, it's slower than a typical office printer.
CBAM - Composite-Based Additive Manufacturing
Sheet lamination, in which printed sheets are laminated together, fundamentally has both speed advantages above. And indeed, Impossible Objects claims that their composite-based additive manufacturing (CBAM) technology has enabled the world's fastest industrial 3D printer.
This video explains how CBAM works, and is worth a watch.
LOM - LAMINATED OBJECT MANUFACTURING
The Mcor Iris 3D Printer prints on paper which it cuts, glues, and stacks together. Source: Rik Panganiban via Flickr
Source: Wired
UAM - Ultrasonic Additive Manufacturing
Source: Fabrisonic
The Fabrisonic UAM system retrofitted into a Tormach 1100 CNC mill. Source: 3DPrintingIndustry.com