Additively manufactured femur-styled implant showcases the potential of sphereneRhino platform
July 14, 2023
Rapidia Inc, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in collaboration with spherene AG, a software company based in Zurich, Switzerland, reports it has additively manufactured a femur-styled structure from 316L stainless steel which showcases the potential of the upcoming sphereneRhino software platform.
Utilising its Adaptive Density Minimal Surface (ADMS) algorithm, spherene founder and CEO, Christian Waldvogel, and Creative Technologist, Daniel Bachmann, were reportedly able to design a qualitative interpretation of a femur’s intricate internal structure with the sphereneRHINO plugin, before building the part on a Rapidia Conflux 1 metal Additive Manufacturing machine.
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Rapidia’s two-step AM technology, developed over several years and first revealed in 2019, works by extruding a flowable bound metal paste. The paste is dried, layer by layer, creating green parts with 90% less binder than found in metal filaments or Metal Injection Moulding (MIM) feedstocks. As a room-temperature process, the technology is not limited by the speed of melting and then cooling polymer carriers. Moreover, the low binder content allows green parts to be put directly into short sintering cycles, skipping the debinding step and ultimately outputting many finished parts in under twenty-four hours.
While the above part is not a viable implant and was only created to demonstrate the capabilities of spherene’s software, metal femur replacements offer significant advantages in orthopaedics, especially those produced through Additive Manufacturing. This technology allows implants to be personalised based on precise medical imaging data, leading to improved outcomes and reduced recovery time.
