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Startup Your Engines: REAL 2016 Kicks Off with First-Ever Startup Competition
The second startup to present in The REAL Deal Startup Competition was 
AREVO Labs founders Wiener Mondesir and Hemant Bheda with a sample of their Carbon Fiber-based material
“The material we have developed is high temperature, chemical resistant, and has five times the strength of titanium. So, in conjunction with software that can do true 3D tool parts, we can now start creating objects that are as strong as metal and are much lighter,” Bheda explained to me. “The big applications we see are in aerospace because they want to have structures that reduce the weight of aircraft.”
Not only will 3D printing with AVEVO Labs’ Carbon Fiber Composite Materials make production parts much stronger than titanium and other metal-based materials, it will also, as 3D printing does best, help simplify the process as well.
“Another thing that happens is we start to see the assembly of 10-100 parts, but with 3D printing it can be a single part,” Bheda said. “That reduces the cost and simplifies the manufacturing process, so those are the reasons why we see a lot of interest from aerospace and defense companies, as well as oil and gas companies, because we can now make parts that are much stronger than before.”
In order to actualize the true strength and composition of their carbon fiber-based material, the AREVO team has to work on a more intelligent style of 3D printing, enhancing the typical X, Y, Z-axis printers into one with independently functioning robotic arms, which will allow for both sides of a surface to be built upon.
Application examples given by Hemant Bheda
“All the existing printers out there have only X, Y, and Z; in order for us to do true 3D we needed more than three axes, so we looked at the robotic arm, which has six axie and is very mature. So, we utilized that as the mechanism for true 3D, the machine with the robotic arm is the 3D printer. The reason it is important is that the carbon fibers gives us strength, and even if you’re building a 3D object, if it constrains the fiber orientation only to one plane, we don’t get the best of it, we only get the most optimal performance if we let it orient in X, Y, and Z directions.”
3D printed prosthetic cover by UNYQ
Eythor Bender then went on to discuss how UNYQ is open to multiple 3D printing processes too, and will continue to look towards to future to help expand their products into scoliosis and someday orthotic treatments too.
“We use two types of material, first we started with ABS for the prosthetic covers, we call that our style line because it needs some post-processing and we paint it in various colors, it’s a little more sensitive and used for aesthetic purposes. But we also have a performance line for prosthetic covers which are made from polyamide, they are laser sintered. While we now embark on the scoliosis braces, those will also be made with laser sintering, at least to begin with. What they will be made with down the road is unknown, there is so much development in 3D printing and it’s opening up a lot of opportunities for us to do this differently than laser sintering.”
The 3D printed scoliosis brace by UNYQ
The winner of The REAL Deal Startup has been announced, and the winner is… AREVO Labs! It seems that even in the face of the vast concept of Reality Computing, 3D printing technology still reigns supreme!
