3D-printing services

Savonia's 3D-printing center offers 3D-printing research and development projects from product design to prototype production.

Services pertaining to 3D-printing usually include comparison of different 3D-printing methods in order to find the best solution. Savonia has a wide and modern array of 3D-printing devices which makes it possible to print parts from multiple different materials.

The price of the 3D-printing is determined by used 3D-printing method(3D-printer), -material, and initial information. The case specific pre- and post-treatment operations are considered and included to the manufacturing costs.

Usually the most expensive part of 3D-printing is the designing of the part, and things pertaining to that (ie. manufacturability, part properties for the end use, and so on), especially if not considered beforehand. Manufacturing costs are higher for metal parts than plastic parts, so it is often more sensible to manufacture the part first from plastic and make sure the part design is correct before moving to manufacturing from metal materials. The softwares we have in use, work with the most common file formats, for now the most commonly used file format for 3D-models in 3D-printing is still STL-file format.

Savonia does not offer manufacturing of commercial end products, as many of our 3D-printers are EAKR -funded and our 3D-printing environment is not meant for industrial serial production. If you have a need for manufacturing commercial products, we are happy to offer information about commercial serviceproviders and/or help you to find the service provider that fits your needs. In Finland there are already some noteworthy service providers also for industrial scale manufacturing in mind, and on European scale there are already substantial amount of serviceproviders.

In addition to 3D-printing we offer services like 3D-modeling, 3D-scanning, training and material testing. Our regional cooperatin partners are ie. Kuopio University Hospital, University of Eastern Finland, Savo Consortium for Education and Ylä-Savo Vocational College.