UK inkjet manufacturer Xaar has confirmed that Chinese industrial 3D printing company ZCZH — Foshan Zhongcheng Wisdom Technology, which also trades as Cprint — has chosen its Nitrox printheads for a new industrial wax-jetting system built specifically for investment casting, according to 3DPrint.com. The system jets wax patterns directly from 3D design data, and both companies are positioning it as a production tool rather than a prototyping curiosity — a distinction that matters a great deal to anyone who has ever waited on tooling before a casting run could even begin.
Investment casting, sometimes called lost-wax casting, has depended for millennia on physical wax patterns that get coated in ceramic slurry, burned out, and replaced by molten metal. The bottleneck has always been making the pattern in the first place. Traditionally that means injection-molded wax tooling — hard tooling that itself takes days or weeks to produce and only makes financial sense at volume. Xaar and ZCZH's pitch is that inkjet deposition can skip the tooling step entirely, printing wax patterns straight from CAD.
What's Actually Inside the Printhead
The core of the system is Xaar's Nitrox printhead, which packs 1,000 nozzles into a 70mm-wide head — reported as a 70.49mm print swathe by P&T Review, whose coverage draws on Xaar's own announcement of the launch. That's a meaningfully wide jetting front for an industrial inkjet head, and it's paired with what Xaar calls high-laydown capability — heads built to move a lot of material thanks to the higher viscosities its Ultra High Viscosity technology can handle, rather than the thin, low-viscosity inks typical of graphics printing.
Viscosity is the crux of the engineering problem here. Casting wax is nowhere near as fluid as standard inkjet ink, and most printheads simply aren't built to jet it without clogging or degrading print quality over time. According to P&T Review's report, Nitrox heads are rated to handle fluid viscosity up to 100 centipoise at operating temperature — roughly two orders of magnitude thicker than water — while still firing cleanly through nozzle orifices measured in microns.
Keeping that thick fluid moving reliably is where Xaar's other two pieces of technology come in. SureFlow is a fluid-recirculation system built to keep material continuously moving through the head, and TF Technology is a companion printhead technology built into the Nitrox line — though none of the three sources spell out exactly how TF Technology functions mechanically. Per 3D Printing Industry's report, the recirculation setup exists specifically to prevent sedimentation and lower the risk of nozzle clogging — the two failure modes that turn a wax-jetting machine from an industrial tool into a maintenance headache. Recirculation means the wax isn't just sitting in a reservoir waiting to be pulled through a nozzle; it's actively cycled past the nozzle plate so particulates don't settle out and heavier fractions don't separate from the mix.
Days to Hours, and Why That Number Matters
Both Xaar and 3D Printing Industry frame the headline benefit the same way: production cycles compressed from days to hours, with micron-level accuracy maintained throughout. In an investment-casting workflow, "days" typically refers to the time between finalizing a pattern design and having a physical wax pattern ready for the ceramic shell process — time spent on tooling design, mold fabrication, or waiting in a queue behind other jobs sharing the same wax-injection equipment. Collapsing that to hours doesn't just speed up one job; it changes the economics of who can justify running a casting job at all. P&T Review's report notes the system is aimed at small-batch, complex production, and 3D Printing Industry's coverage frames it the same way under the heading "Supporting low-volume and multi-variant casting" — exactly the kind of work that traditional hard tooling handles poorly, because the tooling cost has to be amortized across a production volume that a short or highly variable run may never reach.
Samual Tam, general manager at Xaar Asia, put the reliability argument directly: "Wax pattern production places very specific demands on accuracy, repeatability and production stability. This project demonstrates how industrial inkjet can be used as a reliable manufacturing process rather than a prototyping tool," he told 3DPrint.com. That framing — manufacturing process, not prototyping tool — is the throughline of both companies' messaging, and it lines up with the target markets both outlets cite: aerospace, automotive, medical devices, and machine-tool manufacturing, all sectors where casting tolerances are tight and part variants are numerous.
Market Context: Wax-Jetting Isn't a Solo Act
ZCZH isn't the only company chasing this niche. 3D Printing Industry's coverage notes that Flashforge doubled shipments of its jewelry-focused wax-jetting systems during the fourth quarter of 2024, and that material-jetting shipments across the broader Midrange category grew 25 percent over the same period. Neither figure is directly about the ZCZH-Xaar system, but together they suggest wax-jetting is moving from a niche demonstrated capability toward a segment with real commercial pull — enough that a UK printhead specialist and a Chinese systems integrator see a reason to partner on hardware built for production rather than R&D labs.
What It Means for Makers
For hobbyists and small shops, none of this hardware is going to show up on a desktop anytime soon — Nitrox heads, TF Technology, and SureFlow recirculation are industrial-grade components built into a system aimed at aerospace and automotive foundries, not garage casters. But the trend line is worth watching for a few reasons. First, it's another data point in the steady migration of investment casting away from hard tooling and toward digital pattern production, a shift that has already started trickling down into service bureaus that smaller shops and independent designers can access on a per-job basis. Second, viscosity-tolerant, clog-resistant printhead technology developed for industrial wax has a track record of eventually informing consumer- and prosumer-grade material jetting, wherever there's a viscosity ceiling holding back what an affordable machine can print. Third, if wax-jetting keeps growing at the rate 3D Printing Industry's figures suggest, expect more printhead makers and system integrators to chase this specific application, which should eventually mean more competition, more service-bureau options, and lower per-part costs for anyone who occasionally needs a cast metal part without owning a foundry.
