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How Area Printing® Works
Some technologies change what an entire industry can make. The printing press. The assembly line. The semiconductor. Each turned something slow and costly into something scalable. Area Printing is built to do the same for metal additive manufacturing, so our customers can design and build what traditional manufacturing never allowed.
Making Metal AM Cost-Competitive at Scale.
Metal additive manufacturing (AM) has proven itself in high-value applications across energy, medical, and aerospace. Beyond these sectors, adoption has stalled, not because the technology underperforms, but because it costs too much. Reaching mainstream serial production requires an order-of-magnitude reduction in cost per part.
Area Printing is built for this step change. By patterning light across an entire area in a single pulse instead of scanning a single spot, Seurat delivers the speed and fidelity required to bring cost per part down to production levels. Our goal is to give customers metal components at a lower cost than both other additive manufacturing processes and conventional machining, casting, and forging.
Learn more about what Area Printing makes possible for:
Area Printing: Breaking the LPBF Scalability Limit.
LPBF and Area Printing take fundamentally different paths to higher throughput:
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LPBF scales by adding lasers, but each additional beam yields diminishing benefit.
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Area Printing scales the entire optical system, not the number of lasers, so throughput keeps climbing.
Designed for industrial throughput without sacrificing precision or surface quality.
Gen 1 is in production today. Gen 2 and beyond are design targets.
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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