UL Blue Card Plastics for Additive Manufacturing / 3D Printer Filament - What does it mean?

This year, Underwriters’ Laboratory released the UL Blue Card Program, a certification for additive manufacturing materials. What does this mean for you and your business? Could this be a gamechanger for commercial 3D printing.The UL Blue Card Program isn’t actually a real “blue card” you hold around on you. No, it’s really a new type of material data sheet used by UL to certify material properties of specific additive plastics. The Blue Card is more like a data sheet UL uses. Blue Cards are an extension of the existing “Yellow Card” system UL utilizes for plastics in general.
Blue Card properties include:
- UL94 Flame Class
- Hot Wire ignition: resistance to ignition of plastics from heated wires
- Dielectric Strength: determines dielectric breakdown of insulative materials
- Inclined Plane Tracking
- Recommended Layer Thickness
- Recommended Post-Processing Methods
This Blue Card system is not something that really means anything substantial as of early 2021. That’s because of two factors:
- UL has very few filaments under their Blue Card System
- UL’s certification doesn’t actually deem a material as “official”
3rd party certification systems are essentially great long term play for building public confidence in the things they certify, but they also often raise the price on materials, without genuinely making a material official.
This Blue Card system does not degrade or demote the quality of filaments you have on hand at all. Don’t be worried, this is simply a 3rd party move to make money off filament certifications. What about material certifications for the huge variety of materials out there? the PEEKs, CF-HTNs, and PETGs of the world? Most likely, these won’t have UL Blue Card certifications for a long time since they are so niche in 3D printing, and since it’s about making money, often manufacturers actually have to pay for the certification of the material. As the Blue Card becomes more well known over the next 5 years, we’ll probably see this used more often. It’s tempting to make purchasing decisions off certifications, and UL is an established entity. However, given how limited the Blue Card program is as of making this video, we do not currently recommend our customers use the Blue Card program to make any purchasing decisions for materials.
At Vision Miner, we specialize in Functional 3D printing, especially high-performance plastics like PEEK, ULTEM, PPSU, PPS, CFPA, and more. If you're interested in using functional 3D printing and materials in your business, feel free to reach out, and we can help you make the right choice for your application.

Call 833-774-6863 or email contact@visionminer.com, and we're here to help!

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