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How Area Printing® Works
When we look back throughout history, there are moments where innovations and technologies create sea change for industries. The printing press. The assembly line. The semiconductor. Incredible transformations for production and value previously unheard of at their time of adoption. For metal additive manufacturing, Area Printing will serve as a historical turning point for an industry now equipped with limitless capabilities.
Area Printing by the numbers.
A select number of profitable and AM serial production applications can be found in the energy, medical, and aerospace sectors. Besides these high-end industries, the technology has a limited adoption rate. The main reason is neither a lack of knowledge nor poor performance, but the high total cost of ownership. Today's established metal AM technologies such as Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF) and Electron Beam Melting (EBM) cost between 1-2 $/cm³. To be competitive with traditional serial manufacturing, the cost must be reduced by more than a factor of 10 to less than 0.1 $/cm³. Seurat Technologies is an advanced metal contract manufacturer that provides serial production of high-volume, industrial-scale parts using its proprietary Area Printing technology. Our unmatched combination of speed and fidelity enables us to be cost-competitive with traditional manufacturing.
Learn more about what Area Printing makes possible for:
Area Printing compared with other metal additive manufacturing processes.
Process | Metric | Year 2024 | Year 2027 | Year 2030s |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Area Printing® (Seurat) | Feature size | 100 µm | 75 µm | 25–50 µm |
Layer thickness | 50–100 µm | 50–100 µm | 25–150 µm | |
Speed | Up to 3.0 kg/hr | Up to 30 kg/hr | 300–1,700 kg/hr | |
Bed size | 450 mm | 1–2 m | 2–10 m | |
Laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) | Feature size | 150–500 µm | 100–500 µm | 75–500 µm |
Layer thickness | 25–75 µm | 25–100 µm | 25–100 µm | |
Speed | Up to 2 kg/hr | Up to 4 kg/hr | Up to 5 kg/hr | |
Bed size | 800 mm | 1.2 m | 2 m | |
Directed energy deposition (DED) | Feature size | 1,000–2,000 µm | 750–5,000 µm | 500–10,000 µm |
Layer thickness | 500–6,000 µm | 500–6,000 µm | 500–8,000 µm | |
Speed | Up to 6 kg/hr | Up to 15 kg/hr | Up to 30 kg/hr | |
Bed size | 1–5 m | 1–7 m | 1–10 m | |
Binder jetting | Feature size | 1,000 µm | ~500 µm | ~500 µm |
Layer thickness | 30–200 µm | 30–200 µm | 30–200 µm | |
Speed | Up to 3 kg/hr | Up to 5 kg/hr | Up to 8 kg/hr | |
Bed size | 400 x 250 x 200 mm | 600 x 500 x 350 mm | ~1 m |
2027 and 2030s figures are targets and projections.
The four steps of Area Printing.
1
Shape the laser beam. Beam shaping of pulsed IR laser source to create a homogenous square field.
2
Project the pattern. Generating projection of area pattern with blue light projector at same size as square laser beam. Aligning both light beams.
3
Pattern the laser with the light valve. Polarizing the IR laser beam horizontally where blue and IR light “pixels” are overlapping via optically addressable light valve (OALV). Polarizing vertically where IR and blue are not overlapping.
4
Melt the patterned area. Splitting vertically and horizontally polarized IR laser beams. Resulting in area pattern further processed through scanner system to melt the powder bed in patterned field.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is Area Printing different from conventional Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF)?
Conventional LPBF works like handwriting by concentrating a laser into a small spot and scanning that spot across the powder bed. Multi-laser systems increase throughput by duplicating beam paths, scanners, calibration, overlap zones, control channels, and thermal interactions. Throughput rises, but system complexity and installed optical power rise with it; additional channels also introduce stitching, soot and spatter, calibration, and repeatability burdens.
Like a printing press, Seurat’s architecture attacks the serialization itself. Rather than writing one melt track at a time, it patterns a two-dimensional tile into a laser pulse up to 10 mm x 10 mm that stamps/prints an area up to 10,000 times larger than a typical LPBF laser spot.
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