The Virtual Foundry

The Virtual Foundry: Pioneers in 3D FDM metal printing

The Virtual Foundry is an American company formed by great experts in the sector of molten metal, which have been constantly working since 2014 to improve and grow its range of filaments and accessories for 3D FDM metal printing. Its products are oriented to solve and simplify problems through innovative metallic materials for 3D FDM printers of any kind.

After years of research and development, The Virtual Foundry has managed to develop filaments that, with just a post-processing process by sintering, allow to obtain all-metal parts and, most importantly, maintaining the natural properties of the metals themselves as they can Be the magnetism or the electrical conductivity.

The great innovation of these filaments is that in order to obtain the totally metallic parts it is only necessary to print the part and sinter it in an oven, while other manufacturers who have tried to develop metallic filaments needed to do an additional process (prior to sintering): debinding , which consists of a chemical process to separate the binder polymers from the metal.

In this way, The Virtual Foundry has become the pioneer and maximum reference in 3D metal FDM printing, obtaining a fairly simple process with results never seen so far in the world of additive manufacturing.

Filamet™: A small step for The Virtual Foundry but a big step for 3D FDM printing

One of the main limitations of the FDM / FFF 3D printing technology was that only polymeric materials could be printed, the additive metal fabrication being synonymous with DMLS technology. With Filamet filaments a new scenario is opened by enabling metallic 3D printing also using FDM technology. It is true that with FDM technology (more sintering process) it is not possible to obtain isotropic and porosity-free parts, but there is a wide range of industrial (and non-industrial) applications that do not require these high quality standards on the final parts. With just one stage of 3D printing in FDM, plus one sintered in an oven, you can get the pure metal end piece. This can be considered as one of the greatest revolutions obtained in the last decade in 3D FDM printing.