Now Supporting Instant SLS 3D Printing Quotes

We've recently deployed automatic SLS 3D printing quotes. This means that AutoQuote3D now supports FFF, SLA, and SLS, the three major 3D printing technologies.

Setting up SLS materials is easy with just a few variables:

1. Sintered powder density
2. Unsintered powder density
3. Reclamation %

We realize that you may not know these variables so we have put in some common materials and their densities in the pricing set up page.

After setting up the material, you can go ahead and add a layer height setting, that's where you'll set your pricing per gram of powder.

That's literally all there is to it! Keep reading if you want to know more.

How we calculate SLS part cost

We start off by determining the working volume of the uploaded part, that's the actual volume of the part and NOT its bounding box. After that we run an algorithm to determine an efficient packing density. There are two variables we optimize for:

1. Minimize the height of the build
2. Figure out the best packing efficiency

In simple terms, for a given part, we maximize packing efficiency by packing as many parts in the XY dimension with the lowest height as many times as we can in the Z direction of the build volume.

Why do we do this?

From our experience, if a customer wants a single part printed in SLS the costs are often prohibiting because we wouldn't run an entire SLS job just for one part. We often recommend that customers print multiple copies or send over multiple parts to make the pricing make sense for them. In rare cases, when turnaround times are not crucial, we tell the customer to wait until we get more orders to fill the chamber and we "toss" their part in there.

Now... Obviously, AQ3D is not able to have this human like reasoning and awareness into how you pack your builds. This is why we cheat a bit by extrapolating the amount of parts to optimize for packing efficiency. Keep reading to understand why it works.

How we mitigate low SLS part pricing

The above method is great for the customer, it provides an optimized pricing for parts regardless of how many parts they actually need. However, this can lead to them ordering a single SLS part for $5 and this is something we are aware of. The way we mitigate this is two fold.

First, you can set a startup cost for every SLS job. This means that you will at minimum charge the client some start up amount, let's say that is $60. The customer will see a quote for $60 + the price of their part ($5)

Secondly, there is a way to set a "minimum job price", meaning that if a quote comes to $25 and your minimum job price is $150, you will charge the customer $150 for a $25 job. You can use the two points in tandem to create something that makes sense for your business.

For the nerds, here is a bit more info on SLS estimation

Depending on the SLS system you own, you can have a reclamation factor (IE. of the powder that's unsintered after your build is finished you can recover 50% of it for the next job). Here's how we figure out the powder amount and why we need the unsintered powder density.

1. We figure out the height of the build and this tells us at minimum how much unsintered powder the build will require.
2. Out of that amount, we displace the unsintered powder with the sintered part powder.
3. The difference between the above is the amount of unsintered powder left in the chamber.
4. We multiply that amount by the reclamation factor. If you can recover 20% of the unsintered powder that's the number we multiply the unsintered powder by.
5. We remove this reclaimed unsintered powder from the pricing of the part since this is powder you can reuse and therefore the customer shouldn't pay for it.

As you can see, having an SLS system that allows for powder reclamation is awesome because it makes you even more competitive.

As always, if you have any questions feel free to reach out to our team.