Recap: RAPID+TCT 2017, Pittsburgh

Now in its twenty-seventh year, RAPID+TCT 2017 is one of the biggest and best-attended additive manufacturing conferences in North America. Running from May 8 to 11, the conference and trade show returned to "Steel City" Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania this year, with three days of technical sessions and an exhibition hall that has grown to nearly double last years' event and more than four times since the last time the conference was in Pittsburgh in 2013.

The Ultimaker team has come to see RAPID+TCT 2017 as a critical opportunity to spend time with other manufacturers, researchers, and experts in the field of additive manufacturing. 3D printing masters arrive from across the globe to exhibit, present talks and workshops, and meet with each other in order to share knowledge and demonstrate the latest innovations, discoveries, and product offerings. Our team introduced our professional desktop solutions, Ultimaker 2+ and Ultimaker 3, to the 5,000 attendees. We offered both a live demo of our dissolvable support process and an introduction to the range of our engineering-grade materials that address the needs of many of our manufacturing and enterprise customers.

In particular, our Ultimaker 3 printers were a big hit with RAPID+TCT attendees and fellow exhibitors alike. A number of visitors took advantage of the chance to talk in-depth with the Ultimaker staff about the capabilities and configuration to solve specific field and part challenges with our latest printer platform. In addition to making ourselves available at the Ultimaker booth, our team was also on hand to support and encourage our Ultimaker North American partners and resellers who exhibited or attended as well.

TCT Medical Manufacturing Innovation display

One of the opportunities for exhibitors and researchers to stand out at the event this year was innovation displays like the SME Medical Manufacturing Innovations series:

"The SME Medical Manufacturing Innovations (MMI) series at RAPID + TCT 2017 explores life-changing additive manufacturing applications, including customized implants, prosthetics, bone and tissue scaffolds, dental applications, bioprinting, and more. You’ll find the industry’s leading manufacturers and suppliers with innovative solutions that will enable and improve your medical and biomedical developments."

An impressive three Ultimaker community projects were selected to be featured in the TCT Medical Manufacturing Innovation display this year.

• Dr. Mike Itagaki of Embodi3d shared a 3D printed vascular model for medical device testing and training, printed on an Ulitmaker 3 (left photo).
• 3D printing for healthcare applications expert David Escobar shared a system to train medical residents on techniques for endoscopic procedures (right photo).
• And the team from GuidePro3D shared a display model of their surgical guides for dental implants!

We loved them so much that we printed duplicates of their projects to share back in our booth as well!

Community event with local 3D printing superstars

Given so many great folks in the 3D printing community in Pittsburgh even when RAPID isn't in town, we were thrilled to put together an evening community event with the 3DPPGH team at HackPittsburgh to feature short presentations from Ultimaker, MatterHackers, and Matt Stultz, the Digital Fabrication Editor of Make Magazine and original founder of HackPittsburgh).

As Sarah Anderson Goehrke of 3DPrint.com described it: "Everyone took a seat as Ultimaker‘s Matt Griffin took center stage to talk about what’s new at the popular Dutch 3D printing company. He shared a look into the Ultimaker 3, introduced in October, and looked to some tools in Cura that might have been overlooked in the latest software release, ensuring that all present understood the offerings from Ultimaker as the company looks to make professional desktop 3D printing more accessible...."

See you next year!

We would like to thank everyone who joined us at RAPID+TCT 2017. We are already looking forward to next year's edition of the event, which looks to be April 2018 at the Fort Worth Convention Center, Fort Worth, TX.