50c party, page-63

I'm a share holder since a year or more, but I'm still not convinced of this "fastest printer in the world".

I'm working in the additive manufacturing industries with similar powder bed printing machines from german competitiors that have been around for 20+ years. And their machines are everything but crap as said above by someone definitely not in the business.

Depositing multiple layers at a time doesnt significantly increase printing speed. Depending on the print job but the best it can do is a 20% increase.

Printing speed is measured in melted cm3/hour. And the only way to melt more metal is to have more lasers and more power per laser. Depositing multiple layers at a time only reduce conveyor time by the number of layer being deposited simultaneously. Thats it, no more than that. And conveyor depositing powder is in general 20% of total printing time.
Typicaly, a print job can be around 5000 layers of 30 micrometer (150mm heigh job). A single layer time is composed of powder deposition time (8 to 10 sec) and laser melting time (very dependent on what you build and the number of parts, can be from 30 sec to 2 minutes).
So in this exemple, deposition represents 10 to 14hours and lasing time 40 to 166 hours.
Depositing multiple layers at a time will just reduce these 8-10 seconds by this factor : 1/ (number of simultaneous layer).
But melting time will be exactly the same.

If you are still not convinced, lets say a single laser is able to melt 30cm3/hour, how can you increase print speed by depositing multiple layers if you keep the same number of lasers ? Your deposition speed will still be : Number_of_lasers x 30cm3/h.


What I have seen from last video is a 2 lasers machine (SLM Solutions is selling a 12 lasers machine and they have far more experience in multi laser, selling a 4 lasers machine since 10+years).
I'm also afraid on the way they are using these 2 lasers.
Melting metal emits dust and fumes that you can see on the video. When you use multiple lasers you should prevent one laser from emiting fume on a downstream (of inert gas) adjascent laser. And this is typically not done on the video. This reveals a lack of deep understanding of this very complex process. The thing is that you cannot shoot laser as you want and get dense material with sound mechanical properties.
These laser path strategies requires a lot of Software development and I don't know is A3D have this skill inhouse.

I mean I still find this MCP cool, and my message doesnt go in my direction as a shareholder, But to me they are lying of its actual and potential abilities.

I'm not bashing or anything but I would really like to be challenged on this productivity point