Case Study: Oak Ridge National Laboratory achieves rapid, low-cost injection-molding tooling with ExOne's binder-jet 3D printing (under 32 hours, 55% cycle-time reduction)

Oak Ridge National Laboratories - Customer Case Study

Oak Ridge National Laboratories faced long lead times and limited design freedom for injection molding tooling because traditional machined tools could not incorporate advanced conformal cooling or be produced quickly. To address this, Oak Ridge National Laboratories partnered with ExOne to explore additive manufacturing solutions using binder jetting on the ExOne M-Flex® metal 3D printer.

ExOne 3D printed an H13 tool steel molding core on the M-Flex, sintered it to full density, then machined and polished the tool, producing molded cups in under 32 hours. The ExOne solution delivered advanced internal conformal cooling at low incremental cost, cut cycle time by 55%, required only $700 total (printing, sintering, machining) and about four hours of finishing, demonstrating faster, cheaper, and higher-performance tooling than traditional methods.

Oak Ridge National Laboratories

Amy Elliott

Lead Researcher