Yokohama (JAPAN), January 6th, 2009. The Japanese office of Materialise NV, world leader in software development for the rapid prototyping and manufacturing (RP&M) industry, hails D-MEC as the first Japanese customer of its revolutionary and highly intelligent e-Stage software. e-Stage automates the work preparation process when generating support structures, eliminating all manual editing, and also helps save on resin, finishing time and build time.

D-MEC holds its headquarters in Tokyo and has a technical center in Tsukuba, the heart of R&D in Japan. It is a subsidiary of JSR, a renowned manufacturer of advanced materials, and a major supplier of stereolithography resin. D-MEC was a vendor of ‘Solid Creation System’ (SCS) machines, formerly produced by Sony Manufacturing Systems. In addition, they have recently developed a micro-stereolithography machine that can achieve resolutions within 2 microns.

D-MEC has now acquired Materialise’ e-Stage software for the generation of support structures, hence becoming the first e-Stage customer in Japan. “e-Stage has clearly proven to increase our productivity thanks to a drastic decrease in support design time and time spent on support verification”, says Mr. Takiya, Director of D-MEC. “e-Stage has also decreased post processing effort thanks to easy-to-remove support structures.”

The e-Stage software not only automates prep work, reducing it to ‘a push on the button’ and eliminating the need for processing the support structures manually, it also optimizes the manufacturing process. Its excellent support structures guarantee shorter production times and lower resin consumption.

e-Stage offers the added benefit of reduced time spent on the overall project. The supported model can be removed more efficiently from the platform and the support structures can be removed more quickly and easily from the model. Both save a lot of time. The unique new connection between the supports and the component substantially cuts the time required for model post-processing.


About Materialise

With its headquarters in Leuven, Belgium and branches all over the world, the Materialise Group is best known for its activities in the field of rapid industrial and medical prototyping. Apart from having the largest capacity of rapid prototyping equipment in Europe, Materialise enjoys a worldwide reputation as provider of innovative software solutions. As such, Materialise has acquired the position of market leader for 3D printing and Digital CAD software in addition to being a major player in medical and dental image processing and surgery simulation. Its medical and dental products are used worldwide by renowned hospitals, research institutes and clinicians. The group has several subsidiaries in Europe, Asia and the USA, and employs over 700 people in its 4 divisions.

More information on www.materialise.com