Tooling-Free FDA Compliance: How Lynxter’s New SIL-004 Prints Food-Grade Silicone in Hours
This new additive material offers food-processing plants a rapid, cost-effective method to produce custom gaskets, seals, and production-line parts at fraction of the time of traditional manufacturing.
Lynxter, the French 3D printer and materials manufacturer is broadening its silicone system’s reach into the food industry with a new FDA food-contact silicone material.
The new SIL-004, which is only printable with Lynxter’s printers, targets a long-standing gap in additive manufacturing: directly printing functional, flexible silicone parts that can be used in regulated food-contact environments, like food processing, rather than printing a mold and then casting silicone into it.
The practical implication is customization with compliance. A scraper for a chocolate line, a custom gasket for a legacy filling machine, or a prototype food-contact mold may have complex geometry and low production volume, so are costly to produce. With a printable food-grade silicone, those parts can potentially be made without dedicated tooling, which Lynxter says reduces production from several weeks by casting or molding to “within a few hours” for SIL-004 parts.
Much silicone 3D printing to date has been discussed in connection with medical, soft robotics, anatomical models, textiles, and other functional elastomer applications, but industrial food contact is a tougher market because material compliance and cleanability matter alongside mechanical performance, Lynxter says.
According to the company, the material is not only compliant with FDA CFR 21 177-2600, but free from BPA and PFAS, and intended for the rapid production of functional parts used in food-processing environments, such as custom seals, conveyor-line parts, scraping systems, food-grade molds, and hygienic design prototypes.
Lynxter describes SIL-004 as the “world’s first” 3D printable silicone compliant with the FDA food-contact standard. The material is compatible with the company’s S300X LIQ21/LIQ11 and S600D printers.
“Requests for food-grade silicone parts have surged with the widespread adoption of the S300X – LIQ21 | LIQ11, so we decided to tackle the challenge head-on,” says Lynxter CEO Thomas Batigne.
SIL-004 expands Lynxter’s elastomer materials lineup, which also includes SIL-001, a 50 Shore A silicone; SIL-002, a 70 Shore A high-hardness silicone; and PU-001, a 70 Shore A polyurethane. The new material is positioned for food, cosmetics, and other sectors where material-contact compliance is required.
SIL-004 has a 50 Shore A hardness, 203% elongation at break, 6.12 MPa tensile strength, and an operating temperature range of -50 °C to 250 °C. It is blue, uses a 1:5 mixing ratio, and is available in 5 g syringes and 850 g cartridges. Lynxter lists SUP-001 as the support material.
The company has not released any detailed post-processing requirements, surface-finish data, cleaning/sanitization test results, EU food-contact compliance, pricing, or a customer use case. Still, Lynxter’s SIL-004 pushes silicone 3D printing further into regulated production applications enabling food industry manufacturers to produce custom tooling, seals, parts, and molds faster and with less dependence on molds.
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