3M Technology Platforms

With Additive Manufacturing, 3M is defining the shape of things to come. Using its expertise in material science and processing, 3M is taking this digital technology to the next level to create solutions with unique material properties. Thanks to the ability to realize complex geometries, voids and undercuts that are otherwise-not-possible with conventional techniques, we are opening up endless possibilities for our customers across industries: creating perfect smiles, reducing lead times for complex tooling, and helping machinery operate in the harshest of environments. At 3M, we are pioneering new additive materials, methods and services, enabling new business models and addressing key customer challenges to bring value to the market.    

At 3M, we use molding to create complex and customized components in thermoplastic and thermosetting materials using advanced technologies that deliver high-performance solutions to our customers. Driven by the high tolerances demanded by these applications, 3M has developed unique expertise in tool design, precision machining, metrology, and mold processing. The result is a diverse blend of products that include 3M’s personal protective equipment, dental restorative material dispensers for oral care solutions, automotive aftermarket paint application solutions, and precision optical components for electronics and communications markets.

Featured Products: Accuspray™ ONE Spray Gun System with PPS™

3M has pioneered the use of tiny, precisely shaped structures to give materials new physical, chemical, or optical properties. Microreplicated prisms are used in road signs and electronic displays to capture and reflect light more brilliantly. Microreplicated microlouvers protect display privacy. Fine triangular microreplicated ceramic particles make 3M’s coated, bonded and nonwoven abrasives cut faster and last longer. And microreplicated adhesives enable graphics films to be applied more easily without trapping air bubbles.

Featured Products: 3M™ Controltac™ Graphic Film With Comply™ Adhesive IJ180Cv3, Precision Shaped Abrasive Grains, 3M™ Diamond Grade™ DG³ Reflective Sheeting

In the past, high-volume manufacturing could mean wide product performance variability. Not anymore, thanks to advancements in coating, drying, curing, web handling, and other technologies. 3M researchers are designing production equipment that combines finely controlled processes with the economic efficiencies of high volume, continuous roll-to-roll manufacturing.

Featured Products: Command™ Hook Adhesives, 3M™ Sun Control Window Film, 3M™ Cupped Particulate Welding Respirator 8514, P2, with Nuisance Level* Organic Vapour Relief, valved

3M’s ability to create and disperse particles―in liquids, coatings, films, adhesive, and composites - allows it to give unique characteristics to its abrasives, dental restoratives, inks, window and optical films, carbon fiber reinforced composites, and a host of other products. Our understanding of physical, chemical, and interfacial interactions allows us to apply precisely distributed particles and nanoparticles (such as glass beads / bubbles, carbon, and metal oxides) to affect a material’s strength, refractive index, conductivity, IR absorption, catalytic activity, and other characteristics.

Featured Products: 3M™ Window Films

3M is a world leader in the development and use of polymers, combining and shaping these unique molecules into films, tapes, and other products through extrusion, co-extrusion, extrusion coating and other processing techniques that rely on the viscosity reduction that occurs at elevated temperatures in polymeric materials. Nearly all 3M technology platforms and all business groups rely on polymer processing for products including tapes for automotive attachment and industrial assembly, graphics and traffic signage films, light management films for window and display applications, medical tapes and dressings, as well as masking, office and duct tapes.

Featured Products: 3M™ Sun Control Window Film

The materials in many 3M products are cured, modified, or enhanced through physical or chemical changes―such as heating, polymerizing, crosslinking, ablating, or degrading―that are caused by radiation processing. We use ultraviolet and/or visible light, electron beams, fast-paced laser pulses, microwave, infrared, gamma radiation, and other technologies to produce improved products. Radiation processing touches a majority of 3M’s 51 technology platforms and is a critical element for product platforms ranging from adhesives and abrasives to dental and healthcare.

More than any other company, 3M delves into the surface of things. We create unique surfaces by modifying substrates (e.g. particulates, fibers, films) using gases, liquids, aerosols, or solids to change the properties of the interface between the substrate and a contacting layer or matrix. We also modify the surfaces of films and web materials using heat and vapor-processing technologies. These sophisticated tools allow us to improve the receptivity of a material to fluids and adhesives, alter hardness, enhance reflectivity, or create other novel characteristics.

Featured Products: Scotch® Box Sealing Tape, 3M™ High Intensity Prismatic Reflective Sheeting

Critical product performance characteristics often depend on a precise coating with a metal, oxide, or polymer. 3M has created this valuable vapor processing platform through the refinement of vacuum and non-vacuum technologies that coat or remove nanometer amounts of materials. Many of our current products owe their unique durability, reflectivity, barrier, and chemical properties to the company’s expertise in this specialized manufacturing technology.

Featured Products: Scotchlite Reflective Materials

New-to-the-world technologies generate solutions for our customers―and a host of questions for our scientists. What is this? How does it work? Can we make it better? To answer those questions, 3M has developed an unrivaled capability for measuring, characterizing, and understanding materials and processes. With resources located around the world, 3M scientists can draw on our analytical strengths during all phases of product development, from concept through commercialization and manufacturing.

Featured Products: 3M™ Cubitron™ II

For more than half of 3M’s products, the last step in the manufacturing process is the conversion of a film, abrasive, tape, or other material into the specific shape and size that a customer requires. Our ability to rapidly reconfigure how a product is cut, shaped, and finished allows for efficient customization with consistent quality. And this manufacturing agility is matched with capacity for flexible packaging that preserves and protects the finished product―and the branding strategy of the seller.

Featured Products: Post-it® Super Sticky Notes

The extreme precision of 3M’s manufacturing―in some cases, tolerances are less than a wavelength of light―require similarly precise tools for measuring and inspecting product quality. 3M has created optical, infrared, and UV-sensing systems, gauges, and other proprietary tools for measuring performance, strength, color, reflectivity, and thickness. These and other parameters provide exact, high-speed confirmation that our processes are operating at peak efficiency and uniformity and that our products conform to all of our customers’ specifications.

Featured Products: Scotch-Brite™ Products

Precise, consistent, cost-competitive, and safe: expectations are high for sophisticated manufacturing technologies. Few companies in the world can compare with 3M in the design and operation of the most demanding continuous processes, especially web handling, coating, and drying. 3M strengths include sensing, collecting data, modeling, and control systems leading to flexible, integrated, and sustainable manufacturing. The result of SMART manufacturing for customers is apparent in every high-quality 3M product… and every rapid modification in those products to meet local market needs.

Featured Products: 3M™ Cubitron™ II, Post-it® Super Sticky Notes, ScotchBlue™ Painter's Tape

At 3M, part of our Sustainability mission is to help ensure that all 9 billion people living on our planet in 2050 are living well. How will we do this? One way is by leveraging Sustainable Design of our products, processes, and packaging. Sustainable Design includes several facets:
 

• Material considerations: Minimization of the quantity of materials, use of recycled or renewable raw materials, and avoidance of materials that negatively impact health/environment
• Efficient Manufacturing Processes & Supply Chains: Minimization of waste, energy, water, and air/water emissions; use of short supply chains that leverage local sources of supply, and minimization of product/packaging weight to reduce the environmental impact of transportation
• Sustainability Benefits for Customers during Product Use: Saves energy or water during use, reduces waste or improves productivity for customer; or is designed for long life (durability, easy repair)
• Third Party Sustainability Certifications:  End of Life considered during product design: Product is reusable, recyclable, or compostable. Or, product designed for easy disassembly and recycling or product take back program organized.

Featured Products: Post-it® Greener Notes

Many 3M products are designed for the outdoor elements. Customers expect our traffic safety materials, signage, and other products to perform reliably after years of exposure - even to extreme weather. To ensure that high level of performance, 3M has developed technologies that replicate the extremes of light, heat, cold, and moisture found outdoors around the world. By combining real-world and accelerated exposures, 3M has developed an unparalleled ability to measure, analyze, and respond to the demands made by the toughest environmental conditions.

Featured Products: 3M™ Diamond Grade™ DG3 Reflective Sheeting, Graphics & Signage

Computer Vision plays an integral role in a variety of innovative 3M products across multiple divisions. The company’s expertise in light management materials when fused with state-of-the-art pattern recognition algorithms yield innovative products with enhanced machine readability properties. Such efforts include, license traffic signs and pavement markings that can help autonomous vehicles navigate, orthodontic treatments that are tailored to the patient and advanced image acquisition and analytics technologies for digital oral care.

Featured Products: 3M Connected Roads All Weather Elements

Data Science is an interdisciplinary field that uses scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract knowledge and insights from both structured and unstructured data. 3M applies Data Science to discover heretofore unknown insights to solve challenging and complex customer problems in healthcare, safety, industrial automation and more. We integrate data from our own materials and processes, plus incorporate research and customer data to create unique 3M products and solutions.

Electronic Systems are found in many 3M products from 3M™ Connected Safety and True Definition Scanner to 3M™ Littmann® Electronic Stethoscopes. 3M’s advanced Electronic Systems often pair with custom software systems, making products smarter and pushing products higher up the value chain. By combining 3M’s world-leading expertise in materials and processing with cloud technology and analytics, Electronic Systems is a powerful platform to create smart materials, smart devices, smart systems; all while providing a smart service.

Featured Products: 3M™ Versaflo™ TR-600 PAPR

Harnessing sophisticated computer modeling and simulation technologies, 3M researchers and engineers can predict the properties of yet-to-be-made materials, design new products, and accelerate the development of better manufacturing processes.

Thanks to 'virtual' prototyping and experimentation, 3M has been able to speed up the delivery of valuable new products across all 3M businesses and markets.

Featured Products: 3M™ Sun Control Window Films

Advanced Robotics processing is a technology platform that combines mechanical design, physical manipulation, perception sciences, and computer-controlled devices. 3M uses traditional robotic processing to drive value stream optimization in 3M manufacturing and more recently uses advanced robotics to produce mass-individualized products. Additionally, robotic processing drives high-throughput product development in 3M labs, leverages machine learning, and develops automation-ready products with high product performance for use in automated settings. Robotic processing impacts most of 3M’s divisions through R&D or manufacturing and is gaining relevance to customers of 3M Abrasives, 3M Adhesives and other product platforms.

The faint flutter in a newborn’s heart, a crucial shift in temperature that destroys a vaccine’s potency, a genetic marker for cystic fibrosis, a power outage that leaves thousands in the dark―these and other indications can be detected and communicated by 3M sensors and other sensors relying on 3M components. Our technologies respond to a comprehensive array of stimuli, including heat, light, pressure, radio, chemical, biological, high voltage and other signals. Sensor applications are also comprehensive, ranging from low-cost indicators―such as single-use sterilization test strips―to advanced, automated diagnostic devices.

Featured Products: Detection Solutions

Application software is designed to perform a group of coordinated functions, tasks, or activities for the benefit of the user. It controls, monitors, interacts with, and enables many 3M innovative technologies, including medical coding applications for hospitals, digital impressioning for dental and orthodontia clinics, and mobile biometrics for law enforcement. Application software may run on smartphones, tablets, laptops or desktop computers, or may be embedded in special-purpose electronic hardware and systems. 3M uses state-of-the-art tools and techniques to develop application software that is secure, easy-to-use, scalable and globally deployable.

Loud, unpleasant noises aren’t just irritating―they are also a threat to our health and safety. 3M has engineered select nonwovens, viscoelastic polymers, and other materials to absorb sound, dampen vibration, and control undesirable noise. In automobiles these materials create a quieter passenger compartment. In computer disk drives, they reduce irritating sounds and help increase access speed and storage capacity. In the workplace they reduce distraction, protect hearing, and allow communication. In health care, improving sound clarity for clinicians using stethoscopes.

3M™ Biodetection and Microbial Management platform encompasses fundamental understanding of microbial physiology and biochemistry and integrating a variety of core technologies such as specialty materials, nanotechnology, adhesives, and microreplication to create solution for real world problems. 3M has developed fast and easy-to-use systems for detecting, identifying, and quantifying microorganisms in a variety of environments including food production and healthcare facilities. The platform also enables 3M products widely used to eradicate potentially pathogenic bacteria on skin, mucosal tissue, medical instruments, and environmental surfaces and to validate that sterilization of medical equipment has been successful.   
 

Featured Products: 3M™ Petrifilm™ Plates

Through innovations in connected technology, 3M is making our smart products even smarter. Connected Systems use built-in sensors to gather data, and then take action on that data across a network to generate value and insight, with applications ranging from industrial equipment to wearable devices. The connected Systems are a network of devices that uniquely relay their location, sense their surroundings, or report on their internal environment.  Recent examples can be found in workers safety, transportation, air quality and grid modernization applications. 

3M™ Connected Safety is bringing advances of the connected world into industrial worker safety. 3M™ Connected Roads is helping improve roadway safety and efficiency through enhanced transportation infrastructure for both human drivers and connected automated vehicles. Filtrete™ Smart Air Filters are outfitted with a sensor that helps monitor air flow and usage. The Filtrete™ Smart App can display outdoor air quality information for multiple locations monitoring air quality anytime and anywhere.

Pharmaceuticals can enhance and sometimes even save lives. It is important that they are delivered in the correct dose to the correct location at the correct time. 3M has been a pioneer in the development of metered-dose inhalers (for delivering drugs to the respiratory tract), transdermal patch systems for systemic delivery, and microstructured transdermal systems for intradermal drug delivery. Today, our expertise in formulation chemistries and drug delivery technologies is complemented with decades of experience in regulatory affairs, quality assurance, and precision manufacturing.

Displays have become omnipresent in our daily lives – putting information and communication at our fingertips. At 3M, we develop a wide range of technology and products for displays to enhance the visual quality, reduce the energy consumption, protect display surfaces, keep information secure, and enhance the user interface. By combining our expertise in films, light management, adhesives, nanotechnology and microreplication, we develop solutions to enable the next generation of displays.

As the world searches for new ways to generate and store energy, it turns to 3M technology. From consumer electronics to electric vehicles to flow batteries for grid storage and backup power for telecommunications towers; 3M’s battery and fuel cell technologies help to efficiently and reliably store and deliver energy when and where it’s needed. The company is a global leader in fuel cell and redox flow battery components, particularly in the design and manufacture of cost-effective membrane electrode assemblies. In the photovoltaic industry, 3M is advancing technologies (including barrier films and Fresnel concentrator lenses) and supplying products such as very high-bond and conductive foil tapes.

Featured Products: 3M™ Glass Bubbles, 3M™ Wind Protection Tapes

Engineered Graphics includes a wide range of technologies and applications from printable films for custom graphics to durable solutions for traffic signage. 3M redefined advertising with the first digitally printed, wall-sized graphics, then further enhanced our designs to make installation easier. We invented printable and retroreflective signage substrates based on microreplication, and refined our inks and pigments to ensure true, bright colors last even under the harshest conditions.

Featured Products: 3M™ Controltac™ Graphic Film With Comply™ Adhesive IJ180Cv, Digital Traffic Sign Printing,3M™ Envision™ Print Wrap Film

As the world becomes ever more digital, the opportunity for new materials and technologies that can enable flexible electronics continues to emerge. Such flexible electronics may take the form of displays and sensors that can bend, conform, or dynamically change shape across a diverse set of use modes. Some first applications include folding displays for consumer electronics, wearable devices for personal health monitoring, and 3D shaped interfaces for the automotive human to machine experience. 3M’s strong materials, process, and manufacturing capabilities are aligned to support the unfolding needs of flexible electronics.

Featured Products: Wearable Sensor Adhesives

Pharmaceutical, food, and specialty chemical manufacturing demand components of the highest purity. To meet the rigorous standards of these and other industries―3M offers multiple liquid and gas filtration, separation, and purification options, including electret, membrane, carbon, and nonwoven fiber technologies. This expertise has been applied to 3M’s personal respirators and masks, consumer air filters for homes and cars, purifiers for pharmaceuticals, home water treatment systems, and other products.

Featured Products: 3M™ Particulate Respirator 8210, N95

In more than 6,000 hospitals around the world, 3M’s advanced software and consulting services help organizations capture and classify health care data, allocate resources, comply with regulations, manage revenue, and ultimately improve the quality of patient care. Our solutions bring significant cost savings to health care organizations and help governments and health policy agencies worldwide manage costs and improve the outcomes of their local and national health care systems.

Begin with 3M's intimate understanding of advanced materials. Combine those materials in thin films with hundreds of layers. Integrate with 3M's unmatched ability to create microscopic structures on films (and other surfaces). By mixing these and other technologies, 3M manipulates light to transform everyday products. Signs are brighter and easier to see. Buildings are more energy efficient. Security markings seem to float above documents. Electronic displays are more vivid but draw less power. All through the power of light management.

Featured Products: 3M™ Sun Control Window Films

With 3M mechanical fasteners, customers can attach materials and then detach them―over and over again. We create the durable structured surfaces using a combination of our unique technologies including microreplication, polymer processing, adhesives, and nonwovens. These “catch and release” fasteners have transformed such diverse products as infant diapers and abrasives; they are also used in transportation, health care, sporting goods, and electrical products.

Featured Products: 3M™ Dual Lock™ Reclosable Fasteners

Dangerous infection is a risk whenever a patient's skin is compromised through surgery, an accident, or an IV insertion. Advanced adhesives, films, nonwovens, and specialty materials have been applied in 3M health care products―such as our absorbent and transparent dressings, surgical tapes and drapes, as well as skin preparation products and cleansers―that promote faster healing and reduce the threat of infection.

No matter your industry, 3M thermal management materials can help you design devices that run cooler and more reliably. Their excellent stability, thermal conductivity, high dielectric strength and conformability make them ideal for applications including thermal management of microprocessors, computers, server systems, lithium ion batteries, electrical transformers and high temperature processing equipment as well as protect surroundings from high heat loads and fire.  Example materials include heat transfer fluids, ceramics, resins, sealants, adhesives, tapes, pads, nonwovens, and ceramic woven fibers.