Carbon on Developing More Innovative Materials and the Importance of Sustainability in AM

When Carbon was founded in 2013, it set about to radically change product development and manufacturing with its ultra-fast photopolymerization printing process, Digital Light SynthesisTM (DLS). Since then, the company has continued to make waves as companies like adidas, Ford Motor Company, Becton Dickinson Company, and others leverage the Carbon DLS™platform to “deliver better products in less time.” And it does not plan to stop there. Beyond continually improving its technology, the company has been focusing on innovative material development as well as helping the industry become more sustainable as a whole. We sat down with Jason Rolland, Senior Vice President of Materials at Carbon, to learn more about how their technology works, materials, and of course how they are working towards a more environmentally-friendly world.

3DN: Could you please introduce yourself?

My name is Jason Rolland, I lead the Materials team at Carbon, I’ve been with the company for over eight years. I joined really early on, I was employee number 8 and we now have over 500 employees so it’s been fun to watch the company grow and see all the awesome things that have emerged. My background is in Polymer chemistry, I did my undergrad at Virginia Tech and my PhD at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. That’s where I met Joseph DeSimone who was my PhD advisor and later brought me into Carbon. Joe is a cofounder at Carbon. He introduced me to the technology early on and recruited me to build up the Materials team and platform. I was brand new to 3D printing prior to that and it was super exciting to see the new technology and the potential for where it could go.

Jason Rolland, SVP of Materials at Carbon

3DN: Could you tell us more about Carbon and your DLS technology?

Since the beginning of Carbon, we have been focused on getting 3D printing into production at scale. To do this, two major issues we needed to address were print speed and material performance. 3D printers can be quite slow no matter what technology you are using and that impacts cost per part, as you are not able to produce in high volume. To address this, we developed Digital Light SynthesisTM (DLS) technology. With it, essentially, we were able to greatly reduce the adhesion forces of the building part to the bottom of the cassette and, consequently, greatly increase print speeds.