The Arburg Freeformer is an industrial 3D printer made by ARBURGadditive, a manufacturer from Germany. One of its distinctive features is that it’s a pellet 3D printer: the materials used by the freeformer are plastic pellets, also called plastic granulates.

This 3D printer is capable of 3D printing objects without support structures, layer by layer from minuscule droplets. The discharge unit with nozzle remains stationary, while the component carrier moves on three or five axes. Depositing drops of liquid plastic to build up parts, layer by layer, the freeformer has a patented nozzle that opens and closes up to 100 times a second.

This 3D printing technology is close to the ProJet technology by 3D Systems and is close to the approach chosen by HP for their line of industrial-grade 3D printers. ARBURGadditive named this new 3D printing technology the additive ARBURG Plastic Freeforming (APF) process and introduces the freeformer as an alternative to injection molding.