Acknowledged for the capabilities of its manufacturing platform DAPS™, Divergent Technologies officially becomes a 3D printer manufacturer. The company whose technology is used to manufacture the czinger vechicles, has unveiled what it describes as the most advanced industrial metal 3D printer in the United States, the Monolith One.
The launch is made alongside the announcement of a second factory in Long Beach, California, that will lift its annual production output eightfold across defense and commercial programs.
What we know about the Monolith One
Standing over eight metres tall and six metres wide, the Monolith One is a laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) system delivering 24 kW of laser power through twelve 2 kW lasers, with an expanded 700 x 700 x 835 mm build volume.
It is compatible with any industry-standard alloy, including aluminum, nickel, steel and titanium. Developed over 28 months under CTO Brian Erhartic, the printer is not commercially available; it exists solely as a component of DAPS™.
Six units are already running at the Torrance headquarters, with 64 more to be brought online in Long Beach over the next 24 months.
“The Monolith One is the first metal 3D printer designed ground up for scaled production of critical hardware,” said Lukas Czinger, CEO and Co-Founder of Divergent. “Importantly, its design encompasses the years of operational insights we have earned delivering production structures to the defense and commercial sectors. Monolith One is an American machine with an American supply chain. We are building them at rate today and our Long Beach factory will house 64 more of them. With annual output in the tens of thousands of munitions airframes or hundreds of thousands of critical piece parts, our second factory represents the new industrial age at scale.”
The 430,000 sq. ft. Long Beach facility takes Divergent’s footprint past 550,000 sq. ft. and is expected to support around 1,000 direct jobs. At full capacity, the company projects annual deliveries of 275,000+ piece parts, 30,000+ missile airframes, 60,000+ warhead casings, 25,000+ automotive subframes or 30,000+ suspension systems.
“Every feature of Monolith One was engineered to maximize reliability, scalability and control,” said Brian Erhartic, Chief Technology Officer of Divergent. “By starting from a clean sheet, our team has built an additive manufacturing solution that expands the overall performance envelope of DAPS, particularly to serve a wider customer landscape and drive efficiency into downstream operations. It’s only because we custom engineered the printer specifically for integration into DAPS, that we were able to realize a significant increase in operational efficiency, quality control, and build volume.”
By engineering its own LPBF machine rather than buying a fleet of 3D printers, Divergent demonstrates how it’s willing to go the extra mile to serve its customer roster and ensure a tight control over its supply chain and the manufacturing process.
If the Raytheon/RTX naval program and the CoAspire RAACM cruise missile delivered in record time on the defense side, and Saab’s part-count-slashing fuselage bridging into aerospace are a few examples of projects where we have witnessed the company technology capabilities, the introduction of this metal 3D printer is telling us that it was just the beginning.
More customers’ pain points could be addressed and we can’t wait to see which ones.
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