Introducing the L1 Printer

THE WORLD’S LARGEST PRINTER WITH DIGITAL LIGHT SYNTHESIS™ TECHNOLOGY

Produce Bigger Parts or More, Smaller Parts: Print large parts and
increase throughput with a build area larger than 1,000 cm2.

Accelerate Time-to-Market: Produce functional prototypes quickly,

move to high-volume production on the same printer.

The Most Advanced Printer in the Industry

LARGE BUILD AREA

The L1 printer offers over
1,000 cm2 of build area

The Brightest IR-Based Water-Cooled

UV LED Light Engine Resin Heating Light Engine

The L1 printer uses a IR-based resin heating Thanks to a water-cooled

cutting edge Digital creates advanced printer
Micromirror Device, dynamics that enable
delivering 4 million great materials from
addressable pixels. high-viscosity resins, like
RPU 130.
light engine, the L1
printer is capable of print
after print with great
consistency between
prints.

High-Performance Materials
Compatible with the complete library of engineering-grade Carbon resins.

CE: Cyanate Ester

DPR: Digital Production Resin
EPU: Elastomeric Polyurethane
EPX: Epoxy
FPU: Flexible Polyurethane
MPU: Multi-purpose Polyurethane
RPU: Rigid Polyurethane
SIL: Silicone
UMA: Urethane Methacrylate
The L1 Printer powers the Carbon digital manufacturing platform
behind game-changing new products. Learn how the world’s most
iconic companies developed and produced breakthrough products
with the L1 Printer.

01
CUSTOMER SUCCESS ADIDAS® | CARBON®

Case adidas and Carbon are creating the next breakthrough

in athletic footwear, leveraging Carbon’s Digital Light
Synthesis technology to bring a new product and platform

Studies
to life: Futurecraft 4D. Together, we are developing the first
mass production process that makes previously impossible
midsole geometries with revolutionary 3D printable
materials, paving the way for custom, high performance
shoes that meet the unique needs of each customer.

02
SPECIALIZED® | CARBON®
Since 1974, Specialized has had one goal: to innovate and
inspire to improve riders’ lives. With the Carbon platform,
Specialized discovered a new way to address a pervasive
challenge for riders and did so twice as fast as their normal
development process.

03
DERBY DENTAL | CARBON®
Derby Dental, one of the largest family-run dental labs
in the U.S., has a vast product portfolio including fixed
and removable prosthetics, support, and clear sequential
aligners. In the spring of 2018, they added a new aligner
division: Smile Shapers®. With a sharp focus on orthodontic
aligners, Smile Shapers works with dental labs that are new
to the clear aligner market and looking to quickly grow
in the category by offering Smile Shapers Clear Aligners
to their customers. Derby Dental invested in Carbon L1
printers to produce tens of thousands of printed models for
thermoforming. Read more to find out why Derby Dental
Lab chose Carbon’s complete digital dental solution, and
why they anticipate incredible success and growth with
thermoforming clear aligners.
ADIDAS® | CARBON®

The Perfect Fit: Carbon + adidas Collaborate

To Upend Athletic Footwear

adidas and Carbon are creating the next breakthrough in athletic

footwear, leveraging Carbon’s Digital Light Synthesis™ technology
and the L1 printer to bring a new product and platform to life: the
4D midsole. Together, we are developing the first mass production
process based on L1 printers that makes previously impossible
midsole geometries with revolutionary 3D printable materials,
paving the way for custom, high performance shoes that meet the
unique needs of each customer.

adidas continues to challenge the industry with its relentless focus

on innovation to improve the performance of athletic apparel.
But their latest idea—creating shoes with variable properties
across the midsole to improve shoe performance for different
sports—presented a difficult hurdle. Midsoles cannot be injection
or compression molded in one piece with properties that vary
across the part. Although they can be assembled from multiple
parts through a labor-intensive process, this introduces multiple
potential points of failure. Confronted with this challenge, the
adidas team shifted its focus to the possibility of 3D printing
midsoles to unlock the design freedom needed to enhance shoe
performance.

Carbon’s rapid product development process enabled adidas to

iterate over 50 different lattices for the midsole before landing
on the current design. Traditionally, product development has
followed four steps: design, prototyping, tooling, and production.
This process is so slow that many product development programs
can only afford three to five redesign cycles before finalizing the
design, constraining the product team’s innovation. The Carbon-
adidas collaboration made ten times as many iterations possible!
Further, each iteration was produced with the same process and
material as the ultimate product. These were not just prototypes
for assessing a design’s visual appeal: We could actually test “With Digital Light Synthesis, we venture
midsole performance in the design stage.
beyond limitations of the past, unlocking
Carbon enables the design and immediate production of products, a new era in design and manufacturing.
eliminating the conventional prototyping and tooling steps of
a traditional product development cycle. This new production One driven by athlete data and agile
process has already allowed adidas to put a new shoe design in
front of select athletes to better understand customers’ needs
manufacturing processes. By charting
around 4D midsoles and, ultimately, to craft a better performing a new course for our industry, we can
shoe. The process enables adidas to print previously impossible
designs without labor intensive and complex assemblies. It has
unleash our creativity — transforming not
also opened up the ability to create optimal designs relying on just what we make, but how we make it.”
software to simulate the production and use of athletic footwear.
An industry leader with exceptional sport-science expertise, adidas
will be able to use this production process to craft custom shoes ERIC LIEDTKE | ADIDAS
with an ultimate performance uniquely tuned for each customer. Group Executive Board Member Responsible For Global Brands
SPECIALIZED® | CARBON®

Innovation at 2x the Speed

CHALLENGE END-TO-END PRODUCTION SOLUTION

Specialized needed to create a bike saddle that maximizes
performance by simultaneously providing comfort and stability.
However, the two major components that were missing were
a material that would allow for the infinite variability of saddle
density, and a production process to build ideal comfort zones.
MEASURING AND MAKING COMFORT
Designing a premium, high-performance bike saddle required a
return to first principles. What elements of design drive a cyclists’
comfort? How could Specialized use additive manufacturing to
structure experiments to better understand product-market fit?
IMPACT ABSORPTION OR ENERGY RETURN?
Elastomeric lattices featuring Carbon EPU resin are well suited
for this application as they combine tear strength, energy return,
and elongation—making them perfect for cushioning, impact
absorption, and vibration isolation.
Specialized was able to develop a bike saddle made from
elastomeric lattices that perfectly matched riders’ requirements of
lower peak pressure with a more gradual pressure distribution, and
then fully scale it to production using the Carbon platform.
In addition, Carbon developed a new technique using excimer
lamps to engineer a tailored, microscopic topography that gives
the saddle the perfect amount of surface grip in a premium matte
finish. This marks the first time this technique has been used in a
commercialized, 3D-printed application.
A BREAKTHROUGH IN
RIDER COMFORT
With the Carbon platform, Specialized was ultimately able to
reduce production time from 24 months to 13 months: a record
time to develop a new bike saddle.

But given the choice, would a rider prefer less impact or

greater energy return? To answer this, Specialized used Carbon
technology to test the same saddle design made with two different
materials: one optimized for impact absorption and one for energy
return.

While it intuitively seems like increased impact absorption would

produce a smoother ride, in reality as the seat absorbed impact, it
slowly compressed, ultimately decreasing comfort. Riders clearly
preferred energy return to hold them in place.
Figure 1: The Specialized S-Works Power Saddle with Mirror
GREATER COMFORT OR MORE CONTROL? Technology built on the Carbon platform

Why choose when you can have both? Specialized

theorized that while creating zones that compressed easily could
improve comfort, riders still needed some amount of support and
pressure to assist with stability and blood flow. The first design
focused on this theory utilized soft, large pockets for the rider’s sit
bones.

Testing showed that uniform softness caused

instability, often associated with gel saddles, and reduced
rider control. This was addressed with a compression gradient,
pocketing the sit bones in a soft center and steadily increasing
the stiffness throughout the Specialized teardrop zones. The Figure 2: Example of a pressure map (left) and the bike saddle
result was the perfect combination: a bike saddle that optimally lattice configuration, showing enhanced comfort zones optimized to
distributes pressure to increase comfort while giving the rider the distribute pressure and improve stability.
control they need to perform at their best (Figure 2).
DERBY DENTAL | CARBON®
Derby Dental Quickly Scales to Meet
Thermoforming Customer Needs
HIGH VOLUME DENTAL
MODEL PRODUCTION
CHALLENGE: MACHINE DOWNTIME
To succeed in the thermoforming category, Derby Dental Lab was
focused on printing 320 models per 10-hour day (between 5,000
and 6,500 models per month), making production uptime a priority.
Previously, Derby Dental Lab found their manufacturing tools
lacked reliability and resorted to purchasing redundant equipment
to guarantee throughput. This created new problems, as the
different tools created high variability and frequently lacked
product quality. The estimated cost of poor product quality is
three times the cost of an individual dental model due to the cost
of repeat work to fix quality issues, opportunity costs associated
with employee time and equipment resources, and shipping
cost. Additionally, Derby Dental could potentially lose recurring
business with poor quality, making this approach less than ideal.
SOLUTION: CARBON L1 PRINTER
By moving production to the L1 printer, Derby Dental Lab
discovered a new level of reliability, increasing production by 60%
with the improved uptime while enjoying speed, accuracy, quality,
and simplicity of digital workflows from Carbon. Derby Dental has
received positive customer feedback regarding the aligner quality
and consistency, contributing to the lab’s goal of offering superior
products and innovative solutions. Most importantly, Derby Dental
was able to successfully print large volumes of high-quality models
with clinically acceptable accuracy.
EFFICIENT POST-PROCESSING
CHALLENGE: LENGTHY MANUAL POST-PROCESSING
As their model throughput rapidly increased, optimizing post-
processing also became a priority. Smile Shapers employees
traditionally post-processed models using manual methods, which
included placing the build platform onto a foiled-lined tray to
capture uncured resin, cleaning models with isopropyl alcohol in
an orbital shaker in two separate cycles, and drying models using
low air pressure flow. The process required four separate steps
and a total of 18 minutes. Increasing their throughput required
simplifying and streamlining cleaning.
SOLUTION: SOLVENT-FREE POST PROCESSING
The Carbon solvent-free automated wash cycle reduced cycle
times from 18 minutes to 7 minutes, saving 15 hours per week. In
addition, they now had end-to-end control and visibility into model
production from cleaning to post-processing, while improving the
quality and consistency of cleaning of every part in their workflow.
WORKING WITH CARBON:
MORE THAN A PRINTER
Derby Dental’s goal was not just to meet their production targets
but to use Carbon as a platform for growing their business.
Business growth required a platform that would scale with them,
that was modular and dependable as their ambitions changed. A
unique part of this process was offered by the Carbon subscription
model, which is based on creating a long-term partnership instead
of a one-time transaction. This agreement enables Carbon to
provide partners like Derby Dental with innovative equipment and
materials that allow for both immediate and long-term success.
Each step of Derby Dental’s success created more of the types of
problems companies love to have: how do you grow production to
meet demand? With the reliability of the L1 printer, Derby Dental
could efficiently scale post-processing. Derby Dental’s production
exceeded expectations so they quickly required additional
L1 printers to keep up with customer orders. With Carbon’s
subscription-based business model, the lab could quickly launch,
and scale seamlessly with new production tools that effortlessly
met their customer’s quality and accuracy needs.
INCREASED THROUGHPUT,
GREATER ROI
Derby Dental Lab’s venture into thermoforming was an 18-month
process that culminated with them receiving FDA clearance and
510k approvals for their thermoforming business using Carbon
technology. Now, Derby Dental is continuing to adjust its printing
strategy and is gaining a greater return on investment. When they
first started printing Carbon models, they printed solid models
that required about 50 minutes to print eight full arch models.
They transitioned to hollow models and can now print 30 models
in 35 minutes with the L1. In a ten-hour shift, Derby Dental Lab can
produce 60% more models than before, allowing them to support
the distribution of their Smile Shapers aligners across labs in the
U.S. and Canada.
Carbon® L1 Printer Specifications

Build Area >40 cm (W) x >25 cm (D) (>1000 cm2)

Materials All Carbon resins

200-240 V 50/60 Hz single phase

Electrical 18 A max draw
Requirements 30 A breaker
Power packs available to connect to common sockets
Dimensions
930 mm (W) x 1140 mm (D) x 1970-2370 mm (H) door closed/open
Installed Size
37” x 45” x 77-107”

1350 mm (W) x 1120 mm (D) x 2160 mm (H)

Crated Size
53” x 44” x 85”

Minimum/ Ceiling: 2750 mm (6.0”) / 300 mm (12”)

Recommended Sides: 150 mm (59.0”) / 2000 mm (79”)
Spacing Back: 1000 mm (39.4”) / 1200 mm (47”)

Weight
730 kg
Installed Weight
1600 lb

800 kg
Crated Weight
1800 lb

1180 kPa
Foot Pressure
171 psi

Minimum Flow Rate: 85 m3/h (50 cfm) with blast gate

Ventilation
4” diameter exhaust above printer

Pressure: 6.5-8 bar (95-115 psi) at inlet

Avg / Peak Consumption: 1.5 liters per minute (ANR) / 30 liters per minute (ANR) for 10 secs
Compressed Air
every 10 mins
Purity: ISO 8573-1:2010 Class 2.4.3

Network
RJ-45 Ethernet port with uninterrupted, direct, outbound internet access via SSH
Compatibility

Input Data File

STL
Format