Filament-Based printing is widely spread nowadays by the availability of home printers using plastic filament to 3D print models. The technology behind this is referred to as Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF). At Materialise we have professional, industrial-grade machines that use a technology called Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM).

In an FDM printer, a long plastic filament is fed from a spool to a nozzle where the material is liquefied and ‘drawn’ on the platform, where it immediately hardens again. The nozzle moves to place the material in the correct location to build your model layer by layer. When a layer is drawn, the platform lowers by one layer thickness so the printer can start with the next layer.

Unlike most home printers, our FDM machines also use a second filament that is exclusively used for building supports. Material layers have to be deposited on top of each other, so support material is necessary to ensure correct building, to support structures which are not self-supporting (e.g. for overhanging structures) and to prevent the model from falling over. 

After the printing process, the support material is either removed manually as is the case with the material Ultem or the model is put into a bath with special soap. The support material of all materials besides Ultem dissolves automatically in this bath. Thanks to this, your designs in these materials can be highly complex and contain interlocking, interlinking, and movable parts.