News

3D Printing for Power Supplies has arrived at Astrodyne

July 30, 2013 by Jeff Shepard

Manufacturing is experiencing a new revolution — 3D printing. 3D designing and printing is helping enable breakthroughs in everything from the design and production of the latest power supplies to automotive parts. Astrodyne Corporation is among the first power supply makers to have invested in a state-of-the-art 3D printer. This new equipment allows Astrodyne’s engineering teams to deliver rapid solutions for customers. Whether it is for standard or custom product development, 3D printing gives Astrodyne’s engineers an extra degree of freedom to try new ideas and test innovative concepts all while saving money and time. As a result of using the 3D printer, the company can design and produce prototypes and full-run products in a matter of hours instead of days and weeks.

The cube printer shown in this video can produce parts up to 5.5” x 5.5” x 5.5” and can use either a PLA plastic or an ABS plastic. ABS plastic is used in the video example because the properties most closely match those of the tooled cases used for mass production. The example demonstrates the production of added elements for a production-tooled case for a specific customer application request. The parts were approximately 3” x 1.4” x .6” and required 1 hour to print.

The customer application required a high level of protection from water ingress. The standard production cases have some venting so a 3-D model was created to verify fit, any potential interference issues and over all concept. From the software model it was possible to generate the print instructions and validate the concept. This allowed the Astrodyne team to “rapid prototype” and drive to a solution quickly including thermal testing with reduced venting.

In this case, a key deadline was meeting the customer test plan to prevent any reschedule of outside lab test time. The 3-D printer allows the development team to make a change to the software model and then get a result the same day which is a significant improvement over a typical cycle for quote, build and delivery of prototype parts. On this particular job we three revisions were needed to reach the optimized final result. With the 3-D printer this project was completed in 1 week including ingress testing from a 3rd party test lab to confirm the results.