With Additive Manufacturing, 3M is defining the shape of things to come. Using its expertise in material science and processing, 3M is taking this digital technology to the next level to create solutions with unique material properties. Thanks to the ability to realize complex geometries, voids and undercuts that are otherwise-not-possible with conventional techniques, they are opening up endless possibilities for customers across industries: creating perfect smiles, reducing lead times for complex tooling, and helping machinery operate in the harshest of environments. At 3M, they are pioneering new additive materials, methods and services, enabling new business models and addressing key customer challenges to bring value to the market.
At 3M, they use molding to create complex and customized components in thermoplastic and thermosetting materials using advanced technologies that deliver high-performance solutions to customers. Driven by the high tolerances demanded by these applications, 3M has developed unique expertise in tool design, precision machining, metrology, and mold processing. The result is a diverse blend of products that include 3M’s personal protective equipment, dental restorative material dispensers for oral care solutions, automotive aftermarket paint application solutions, and precision optical components for electronics and communications markets.
3M has pioneered the use of tiny, precisely shaped structures to give materials new physical, chemical, or optical properties. Microreplicated prisms are used in road signs and electronic displays to capture and reflect light more brilliantly. Microreplicated microlouvers protect display privacy. Fine triangular microreplicated ceramic particles make 3M’s coated, bonded and nonwoven abrasives cut faster and last longer. And microreplicated adhesives enable graphics films to be applied more easily without trapping air bubbles.
In the past, high-volume manufacturing could mean wide product performance variability. Not anymore, thanks to advancements in coating, drying, curing, web handling, and other technologies. 3M researchers are designing production equipment that combines finely controlled processes with the economic efficiencies of high volume, continuous roll-to-roll manufacturing.
3M’s ability to create and disperse particles in liquids, coatings, films, adhesive, and composites - allows it to give unique characteristics to its abrasives, dental restoratives, inks, window and optical films, carbon fiber reinforced composites, and a host of other products. 3M understanding of physical, chemical, and interfacial interactions allows us to apply precisely distributed particles and nanoparticles (such as glass beads / bubbles, carbon, and metal oxides) to affect a material’s strength, refractive index, conductivity, IR absorption, catalytic activity, and other characteristics.
3M is a world leader in the development and use of polymers, combining and shaping these unique molecules into films, tapes, and other products through extrusion, co-extrusion, extrusion coating and other processing techniques that rely on the viscosity reduction that occurs at elevated temperatures in polymeric materials. Nearly all 3M technology platforms and all business groups rely on polymer processing for products including tapes for automotive attachment and industrial assembly, graphics and traffic signage films, light management films for window and display applications, medical tapes and dressings, as well as masking, office and duct tapes.
The materials in many 3M products are cured, modified, or enhanced through physical or chemical changes such as heating, polymerizing, crosslinking, ablating, or degrading that are caused by radiation processing. 3M use ultraviolet and/or visible light, electron beams, fast-paced laser pulses, microwave, infrared, gamma radiation, and other technologies to produce improved products. Radiation processing touches a majority of 3M’s 51 technology platforms and is a critical element for product platforms ranging from adhesives and abrasives to dental and healthcare.
More than any other company, 3M delves into the surface of things. They create unique surfaces by modifying substrates (e.g. particulates, fibers, films) using gases, liquids, aerosols, or solids to change the properties of the interface between the substrate and a contacting layer or matrix. They also modify the surfaces of films and web materials using heat and vapor-processing technologies. These sophisticated tools allow us to improve the receptivity of a material to fluids and adhesives, alter hardness, enhance reflectivity, or create other novel characteristics.
Critical product performance characteristics often depend on a precise coating with a metal, oxide, or polymer. 3M has created this valuable vapor processing platform through the refinement of vacuum and non-vacuum technologies that coat or remove nanometer amounts of materials. Many of they current products owe their unique durability, reflectivity, barrier, and chemical properties to the company’s expertise in this specialized manufacturing technology.