When you're designing a part that needs to seal, bend, flex, and hold up in a harsh environment, silicone is often the material of choice. But fabricating a custom silicone part typically means long lead times, expensive tooling, and limited flexibility during development. When you’re operating with tight deadlines, this can become a major bottleneck.
Silicone 3D printing can provide a useful alternative: the ability to produce functional, performance-grade silicone parts without molds – and with the freedom to test, tweak, and produce on demand.
This blog breaks down how it works, what makes it challenging, and where it’s making the biggest impact across automotive, industrial, and other applications.
Silicone is a type of elastomer known for its unique combination of characteristics, including:
Unlike many thermoplastics or rubbers, silicone can stretch and compress without permanent deformation, even after prolonged exposure to extreme temperatures or harsh chemicals.
These qualities make it a go-to material for seals, gaskets, housings, dampeners, and protective components in automotive and industrial applications. For many engineers, the ability to use true silicone (rather than “silicone-like” substitutes) is critical when parts must endure heat, compression, or chemical exposure over time.
However, while molding silicone is well established, 3D printing it has historically been a challenge.
Silicone’s low viscosity and non-thermoplastic nature make it fundamentally incompatible with most additive manufacturing technologies.
Even when printable chemistries are developed, low-viscosity silicones present a process control challenge: they tend to flow or spread unpredictably before curing, making it difficult to maintain dimensional accuracy, achieve clean layer definition, and deliver a smooth surface finish. And because silicone is soft and flexible even in its final form, printed parts are prone to deformation during both the print and post-processing stages – particularly if not carefully supported or cured under the right conditions.
Stratasys’ approach to silicone 3D printing combines advanced materials with a platform capable of precise, consistent part production: Origin® P3™ DLP (Digital Light Processing).
The real breakthrough lies in the material formulation. Developed exclusively by Shin-Etsu, a global leader in silicone chemistry, P3™ Silicone 25A is a true silicone – not a mimic. Its silicon-oxygen backbone gives it the same chemical and mechanical characteristics engineers expect from molded silicone: flexibility, durability, chemical resistance, and long-term thermal stability.
Printing this kind of material, however, still requires a high level of process control – especially for capturing fine details and ensuring surface quality. Which begs the question:
Silicone is a unique material with several properties that simply can’t be found together in other substances. 3D printing as a process also provides several benefits over traditional manufacturing. Let’s examine silicone material benefits first.
Flexibility and Elasticity
Silicone’s molecular structure gives it exceptional flexibility and elastic recovery. It can bend, stretch, compress, and rebound without cracking or losing form, making it ideal for applications where dynamic movement is required. Its ability to retain shape and performance after repeated cycles sets it apart from thermoplastic elastomers.
Thermal Stability
Silicone performs reliably across a wide temperature range, with exceptional mechanical and chemical stability. It remains flexible at low temperatures without becoming overly soft at high temperatures, making it well-suited for seals. This thermal resilience is particularly valuable in automotive, aerospace, and industrial settings, where parts are often exposed to thermal cycling or constant heat stress.
Chemical and Environmental Resistance
Silicone stands out from many rubbers and plastics thanks to its excellent resistance to:
This makes it ideal for outdoor applications, harsh processing environments, and situations involving contact with fluids. Common uses include seals, gaskets, O-rings, and protective covers: anywhere that durability against chemicals, oils, or weathering is essential.
Durability and Mechanical Strength
Despite its softness, silicone is known for its high tear resistance, dimensional stability, and fatigue tolerance under both static and dynamic loads. It doesn’t become brittle over time, and holds up well under compression or repeated flexing, even in thin cross-sections. This makes it a robust choice in a wide variety of applications.
Biocompatibility
Silicone can be formulated to meet biocompatibility standards, such as cytotoxicity. This makes silicone a trusted material in applications that involve skin contact, such as consumer wearables and medical devices.
When it comes to producing silicone components, additive manufacturing poses several benefits over other methods. Its speed, efficiency, and design flexibility in particular make AM useful for tooling and low volume silicone production.
No Tooling Required
Silicone parts typically require injection mold inserts or compression tooling, which are both time-intensive and expensive to produce, especially for low volumes, customization or test runs. With 3D printing, parts can be produced directly from a CAD model, eliminating the need for hard tooling. What this means for you:
Design Freedom
Silicone molding has inherent limitations: undercuts, thin walls, and internal channels often require complex mold designs, parting lines, or multi-step fabrication. 3D printing removes many of those constraints, allowing engineers to:
This opens new possibilities for designing elastomer components optimized for performance, not manufacturability.
Low Volume Production
For companies producing hundreds or thousands of parts, traditional silicone manufacturing often fails to strike a good balance between cost, speed, and flexibility. Silicone 3D printing offers a practical alternative, when production volumes are too low to justify injection molding.
This makes 3D printing ideal for bridge production, pilot programs, and market testing: giving teams the freedom to move from prototype to product without traditional manufacturing bottlenecks.
Customization and Personalization
One of the most powerful advantages of 3D printing silicone is the ability to create customized parts tailored to individual needs. Because production does not depend on molds or hard tooling, each print can be unique without added cost or delay. This capability is especially valuable in areas where comfort, fit, or patient-specific requirements matter:
By removing the limitations of tooling, silicone 3D printing enables true mass customization. It can support a single patient, a test market, or a product line that thrives on individual fit and feel.
Material Efficiency and Sustainability
Additive manufacturing is inherently less wasteful than traditional methods like machining or molding. Silicone is printed only where needed, with minimal excess. Additional benefits include:
For organizations focused on lean operations or sustainability goals, 3D printing offers a cleaner, more responsive way to produce silicone parts.
Automotive components often face harsh, high-temperature environments, such as in engine compartments and underbody assemblies. Silicone’s natural temperature resistance makes it well-suited for these demands, where thermal stability is non-negotiable.
Key applications include:
In addition to thermal performance, additive manufacturing lets your print only what is needed, without the need to store spare parts or large, expensive molds. This is particularly valuable for aftermarket parts or responsive manufacturing with variable production volumes.
With 3D printed silicone parts now offering true FR capabilities, automotive engineers gain new options for materials that meet both design and regulatory performance needs.
In aerospace, rail, and other transportation industries, materials must meet stringent flame, smoke, and toxicity (FST) requirements while maintaining mechanical performance in demanding environments. Silicone’s natural heat resistance and chemical stability, combined with newly available flame-retardant (FR) formulations, make it an excellent fit for these sectors.
Typical applications include:
By leveraging additive manufacturing, aerospace and rail operators can produce certified components on demand, reduce inventory of slow-moving spares, and adapt designs for specific fleet configurations, all while meeting FST regulatory standards.
In manufacturing, energy, and heavy equipment sectors such as oil and gas, elastomer parts are often placed in chemically aggressive or physically demanding environments. Silicone is an ideal candidate for:
Silicone's resistance to UV, ozone, solvents, and thermal swings gives it a longer service life than many alternative materials. And with 3D printing, it's now possible to:
Compared to traditional silicone casting or molding, additive manufacturing offers a faster and more cost-effective path to functional, field-ready elastomer parts.
In the consumer space – from personal care to wearable tech – manufacturers value silicone for its soft touch, skin safety, and visual flexibility. When 3D printed, it becomes a powerful tool for:
Additive manufacturing silicone enables faster adaptation of form factors, sizes, or aesthetic features, without any tooling investment. And when the silicone is formulated for biocompatibility, it opens the door to skin-contact or comfort-driven designs.
For manufacturing engineers and production teams, 3D printed silicone offers a rare mix of creativity, comfort, and performance.
Silicone isn’t an easy material to print – that’s part of what makes P3 Silicone 25A such a valuable breakthrough. Its softness, flow behavior, and curing requirements pose unique challenges that have historically made true silicone, and even many elastomers, incompatible with additive manufacturing.
Here’s what makes silicone difficult to work with, and how Stratasys addresses each challenge:
Soft silicones often have low viscosity, meaning they can flow or spread unpredictably once deposited. This makes it difficult to control material placement, especially in thin walls or detailed features. If not handled properly, the result is poor dimensional accuracy and loss of definition.
Stratasys’ solution:
The P3 DLP printing process uses precise light control and mechanical actuation to manage flow and cure timing, ensuring stable builds layer after layer.
The silicone formulation itself was developed in partnership with Shin-Etsu, a global leader in silicone chemistry founded in 1926. With nearly a century of experience, Shin-Etsu engineered P3 Silicone 25A to strike a balance between flowability and stability. This allows clean printing devoid of premature sagging or spreading.
Soft materials can deform during printing, which impacts both tolerance and finish. Poor surface quality isn’t just cosmetic. It can affect sealing, friction, and overall part performance.
Stratasys’ solution:
Silicone requires careful curing to achieve its final mechanical properties. Inconsistent or incomplete curing can lead to soft spots, or reduced durability. At the same time, silicone can be “over-cured.” If it’s cured too long it can raise the Shore value, hardening the rubber beyond the desired softness level.
Stratasys’ solution:
By addressing the material and the process, Stratasys brings reliable silicone 3D printing into reach for engineers who previously had no alternative to molded parts. Whether you're prototyping or producing functional elastomer components, the combination of material integrity and print precision makes a measurable difference.
At the heart of Stratasys’ silicone 3D printing solution is P3 DLP (digital light processing) – a tightly controlled photopolymerization process that delivers high detail, excellent surface quality, and repeatable part accuracy. Unlike open DLP platforms, P3 technology incorporates closed-loop light and mechanical control, enabling consistent part quality even when working with more challenging materials like elastomers.
This process produces accurate parts and surface finishes that closely resemble injection-molded parts. Its reliability and precision make it ideal for production aids and low- to mid-volume production, where traditional molding would be too costly or slow.
The printing process alone, however, is not enough to guarantee high-quality silicone. What truly sets Stratasys apart is the material.
P3 Silicone 25A, developed in collaboration with Shin-Etsu, is a true silicone, not a “silicone-like” elastomer. Its silicon-oxygen backbone gives it the thermal, mechanical, and chemical properties engineers expect from conventional silicone rubber. This includes:
When choosing a silicone material for 3D printing, ensure that the material (and your component) will maintain its silicone behavior over time. Check performance data, with an emphasis on aging tests. Unlike thermoplastic or thermoset elastomers, silicones are designed to maintain their properties long-term, even after many hours of exposure to high temperatures. Stratasys’ offering delivers the expected long-term performance, especially for demanding applications in automotive, industrial, and consumer goods.
| P3™ Silicone 25A | Commercial Alternative Silicone | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Initial | After Aging | Change | Initial | After Aging | Change | |
| Hardness (Type A) | 19 | 34 | +172% | 32 | 75 | +234% |
| Tensile strength (MPa) | 5.2 | 4.4 | -15% | 4.1 | 2.1 | -49% |
| Elongation at break (%) | 489 | 220 | -55% | 196 | 12 | -84% |
Many silicone parts are low volume by nature. Customized seals, tool grips, and product-specific gaskets, for example, are often too expensive to mold, especially in early development or for short-run production.
Stratasys enables manufacturers to:
This makes the platform ideal for functional deployment in applications where silicone is required and part variation is high.
P3™ Silicone 25A delivers the full set of properties engineers expect from true silicone – mechanical performance, broad temperature range, regulatory compliance, and injection-molding-level quality. With it, you can produce parts that match the flexibility, thermal and chemical resistance, durability, and compliance of their molded counterparts – without the lead times, tooling costs, or design constraints of traditional manufacturing.
That means you can create silicone parts or components in low volumes or custom batches, knowing each one will perform and behave just like its injection-molded alternative. From seals and gaskets to ergonomic wearables, you can achieve precision fit, consistent quality, and reliable long-term performance – all while taking advantage of the speed, agility, and design freedom of additive manufacturing.
In addition, the material brings the required regulatory compliance across diverse industries, from FST/FR to biocompatibility. And thanks to advancements in both materials and print process control, the technology is now mature enough for real-world production.
Whether you're producing small batches, customizing a low-volume part, or solving for a unique geometry that molding can’t accommodate, silicone 3D printing offers a more agile, cost-effective way to get there.
Learn how Stratasys can help you:
