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Remember Iris van Herpen's digitally-fabricated clothes from Paris Fashion Week? While we didn't realize it at the time, the laser-sintered dress was made from a special material sexily named TPU 92A-1, specifically engineered to provide "durable elasticity." Translation: It's bendy as all get-out, but highly abrasive- and tear-resistant, and appears to have pretty excellent shape memory.
Take a look:
Materialise, who laser-sintered the van Herpen dress, has announced they're making the material available to its professional RP services customers. It seems it hasn't yet trickled down to their consumer-level i.materialise site, keeping it out of reach for most of us, but hopefully it's just a matter of time.
I’m a lapsed industrial designer. I was born in NYC and figured I’d die there, but a few years ago I abandoned New York to live on a farm in the countryside with my wife. We have six dogs.
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Materialise Launches New Flexible & Durable Material for Laser Sintering
Just to mention that i.materialise is doing experiments with the material as well.
So if you want to be updated, you can follow the blog: http://i.materialise.com/blog/
Best
Tatiana, community manager i.materialise
Contrary to what Luke said, the "1" does not refer to the expected lifetime of the material. The "1" stands for the fact that it is the first member of a family of materials, hopefully with many to follow. TPU is an extremely versatile polymer family and we hope that we will welcome many more TPU's for Laser Sintering in the years to come. We even believe that there will be room for more than one Shore A 92 TPU! That is what the material supplier has anticipated by giving it this name!
Toon Roels - AM Material Expert at Materialise
Knowing that, you can look for comparable resins in powder form, and roll your own (assuming you own an SLS or SLM system). Bayer Material Science offers such a material, quite possibly the exact the same one.
Also, now that TPU 92A is known and in demand, it's probably only a matter of time before Shapeways or Ponoko offer it for anyone with a 3D model to benefit; if I were to bet, I'd put put money down that it'll happen by this time next year.
As far as SLS goes, the sky is the limit. No reason you need to be limited to just this one elastomer, and you can conceivably print material with a gradient of properties, provided you're okay with getting different powdered materials all mixed up with each other (and therefore less reusable). No reason you even need to limit yourself to one kind of material --- you're free to blend polymers, ceramics, and metals.