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Die / Mold · Article · 3 min read · From Additive Manufacturing

Video: Corrosion-Resistant 3D Printed Mold Inserts

Materials available for 3D printing have held back adoption of this technology for building mold tooling. At PTXPO, examples 3D printed from Corrax powder illustrated the promise of this tool steel in conjunction with AM. 

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One of additive manufacturing’s best-known benefits for mold tooling is the chance to incorporate conformal cooling — cooling channels that can precisely wrap around mold features to improve molding cycle times by more quickly reducing heat in these regions. But water-cooled channels can present a problem over time; many additively manufactured tools are made from maraging steel, which is fairly easy to 3D print through laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) but is prone to corrosion. A maraging steel tool repeatedly exposed to water may have a shortened lifespan because of this exposure.

At PTXPO 2025, 3D printer supplier Xact Metal highlighted its laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) machine’s compatibility with Corrax, a tool steel from Uddeholm that is now available as a powder for 3D printing. Corrax resists corrosion better than maraging steel, making it possible to produce more reliable molds with conformal cooling and other features such as porous venting, as demonstrated through a porous sample made by Xact Metal user Zero Tolerance. Learn more in the video above. 

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Transcript

I'm Stephanie Hendrixson with Additive Manufacturing Media here at PTXPO 2025 in Rosemont, Illinois. And I'm standing in the Xact Metal booth. Xact Metal provides a low-cost, small-size, compact enough to fit through a doorway, laser powder bed fusion system, and one of the main applications that they see for this technology is making mold inserts.

One of the challenges with 3D printing tooling like this thus far, though, has been in the materials space. Materials like maraging steel can make a viable injection mold, but they are prone to corrosion.

So if you want to use some of the most advanced capabilities of additive manufacturing, like conformal cooling channels, for instance, your mold might have a lifespan on it. It might become too corroded inside of those channels to continue to be used at some point in its lifespan.

One of the materials that Xact Metal uses and recommends to its customers is Corrax from Uddeholm. This is a corrosion-resistant tool and mold steel that is commonly used to machine tools, but now is offered as a powder format as well for laser powder bed fusion. The advantage of using this material is that it is resistant to that corrosion, can provide longer lasting mold tools and help molders achieve better results with their 3D printed tools.

So how is this material in combination with laser powder bed fusion being used?

We have some parts here built by Zero Tolerance, a user of the Xact Metal platform. So this part is a component for a sprinkler system. This is a cap that frequently gets run over by lawnmowers. So people need replacements of these. And this 3D printed tool is used to make this part.

This is the assembled version. But inside this tool has all of these conformal cooling channels, the reason that you would want to use 3D printing, or one of the reasons you would want to use 3D printing to build an injection mold tool for a part like this in the first place.

Before incorporating these cooling channels, this mold had a cycle time of about 52 seconds. With this addition, with these features and the cooling possible, they reduced the cycle time down to 42 seconds. And they believe it's possible to reduce it even further, down to 40 seconds with process optimization in the press itself.

One other possibility that this material makes practical is porous tools. So this is a 3D printed insert that has porosity built right in, using the parameters inside of the machine. This is something that can be used for venting molds.

But the challenges with doing this with something like maraging steel is that, again, you might need to use water to clean this out. You might be using water as part of the venting. And you can get rust. You can get clogging. And so using the Corrax material provides a corrosion resistant solution that allows porosity like this to remain clean, remain usable for the life of the mold.

If you want to learn more about 3D printing for mold tooling, visit AdditiveManufacturing.Media. We've got an entire zone all about 3D printing for tooling.

You can also follow our sister publication, MoldMaking Technology, over at MoldMakingTechnology.com.

Thanks for watching.

Die / Mold