New 3D Printing Technique Is 100 Times Faster Than Standard 3D Printers (ieee.org) 55
A new 3D-printing technique could render a three-dimensional object in minutes instead of hours -- at up to 100 times current speeds. The experimental approach uses a vat of resin and some clever tricks with UV and blue LED lights (no lasers needed) to accelerate the printing process. From a report: The technique looks almost like a time-reverse film loop of an object dissolving in a reservoir of acid. But instead of acid, this reservoir contains a specially-designed resin that hardens when exposed to a particular shade of blue light. Crucially, that hardening (the technical term is polymerization) does not take place in the presence of a certain wavelength of UV light. The resin is also particularly absorbent at the wavelengths of both the blue and UV light. So the intensity of UV or blue light going in translates directly to the depth to which light will penetrate into the resin bath. The brighter the light beam, the further it penetrates and the further its effects (whether inhibiting polymerization in the case of UV light, or causing it in the case of blue light) will be felt in the bath along that particular light path.
Timothy Scott, associate professor of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan, says the way to get a 3D-printed object out of this process is to send UV light through a glass-bottomed basin of resin. Then, at the same time, through that same glass window, send patterns of bright and dim blue light. If this printing process used only the blue light, it would immediately harden the first bit of resin it encounters in the basin -- the stuff just inside the glass. And so each successive layer of the object to be printed would need to be scraped or pulled off the window's surface -- a time-consuming and potentially destructive process.
Timothy Scott, associate professor of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan, says the way to get a 3D-printed object out of this process is to send UV light through a glass-bottomed basin of resin. Then, at the same time, through that same glass window, send patterns of bright and dim blue light. If this printing process used only the blue light, it would immediately harden the first bit of resin it encounters in the basin -- the stuff just inside the glass. And so each successive layer of the object to be printed would need to be scraped or pulled off the window's surface -- a time-consuming and potentially destructive process.
Not New (Score:4, Informative)
Do You Have Such A Printer Already? (Score:2)
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Yeah, not only patented, but not for sale. Only available on some kind of licensed lease/rental deal on the machines.
Creality S-11 ? (Score:2)
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I was thinking of how to do this with Metal, and Carbon Fiber.
Depends on how big of a metal part you need and what strength. If its small, there are 3D metal printers which start at about $100,000. If its larger metal parts you need, you could get a wax printer then send the mold off to be cast.
If its carbon fiber parts your after, the wax approach might work as well. Cast the inverse mold of what you need, then layer carbon fiber sheets over that. Then melt away the mold.
I remember reading somewhere that car manufactures are already using metal printers. It
Small metal parts are affordable too using wax (Score:2)
> If its larger metal parts you need, you could get a wax printer then send the mold off to be cast.
I paid about $20-25 all-in for a custom designed metal ring (jewelry). I believe it used 3D print of the wax, then that can be cast in steel, gold, silver - whatever metal you want.
My understanding is that an object twice as big would NOT be twice as expensive. There are costs to just handling the order. Whether $20-25 is affordable depends on the application, I suppose.
About time! Now all I need is (Score:1)
a sample of Milla Jovovich's DNA
Resin Printers don't sell very well. (Score:5, Interesting)
I love the speed of these 3D printers using Resin, but as a Long-time 3D printing fanatic, I never got one as they are messy, expensive (resin is still hideously expensive) and fairly toxic.
Normal PLA printing is slow, but not terribly slow for hobbyist, I can print a 14 x 14 x 14cm at 100my in less than 9 hours, and that's fairly speedy. If you ever want to have mass production of this, you can use it as a prop for injection molding later, and you can make as many copies as you want, dirt cheap.
PLA printers are a big hit with the consumers, just here where I live - our local hardware chain imports thousands of them every year because they're increasing in popularity, they're cheap, they're fairly easy to maintain now, the PLA filament is dirt-cheap but very environmentally friendly as it's just basically Corn Starch. You can have your commercial 3D printer next to your computer like you had your laser printer in the good old days, and have more fun than ever. I can't even imagine life without my little 3D printing workhorse now. Spare parts for the appliance that broke in the house? No problem. Last time I printed with flexible filament to make a couple of rubber fittings for my kitchen ventilator, the light fixture broke (it's over 30 years old), and the cover plastic that covers it, tabs broke. Took me 10-15 minutes to measure and design an improved flexible insert - 50 minutes to print with a traditional Fusion Filament printer, and done.
Same with my 3D characters, I've been wanting to hold those in my hands for 10+ years, and today it's as easy as a little patience. Takes way longer to order them somewhere and finally get them by mail. 3D printing speed issues isn't that much of an issue unless you're talking workshop speeds where you need it to meet the demands of visitors in eg. a store printing figurines or gimmicks on demand. Kind of like the old 1-hour photo for passports in the old days.
That said, I'd love a super speedy 3D printer (who wouldn't?) - but it has to be user friendly, non-messy and with cheap materials.
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>Took me 10-15 minutes to measure and design an improved flexible insert
What software do you use for design?
>I printed with flexible filament
What filaments do you like?
Do you know if resin printers have a nice smooth surface? The surfaces on my 3D prints aren't really smooth...
Re:Resin Printers don't sell very well. (Score:5, Informative)
>What software do you use for design?
Blender, it's fully open source, free for everyone to use, for whatever purpose.
>What filaments do you like?
I love regular PLA, there are of course quality variations, but I've found that various colors have various temperature tolerances, too much to mention here, but the blue color PLA seems to be the most solid, and easiest to work with, gives the cleanest results. Not all blues are alike, the transparent ones tend to clog up the nozzles and I use those for transparent purposes, for example when I need a button on a device with a LED light behind it.
I like flexible filaments, but even they come in many variations, too many to mention, some are flexible, but won't flex "back" into their original form if they get flexed too much etc, I absolutely love the "glow-in-the-dark" filaments, I often use that for outlines and for special effects on various things - but they have their drawbacks too, such as being brittle and hard on the nozzles..
Resin printers tend to have the best surfaces of them all, but you still need to use some kind of solution to fixate them so they "dilute" the material, sort of "melt" them a little, you can also bake PLA in an oven around 100c to harden them, but they will shrink a little in size as the price for this.
You can achieve almost Resin like resolution on good commercial 3D printers, my flashforge can compete quite easily with a resin printer, but only when I make the printer print extremely slowly, I rarely need that as I usually print big - but i've made many tests, and it works, they're THAT good today, but it takes patience, learning to know the temperatures of the various filaments, and your printers nozzle quality play a part too, as well as your printers resolution of the stepper motors, accuracy etc. Don't get fooled into believing that a printer costing 10 x as much will give you better results, it's mostly up to you, experimentation and some patience.
For absolute accuracy, nothing beats a resin printer though. If you want to make jewellery models, a resin printer would be the way to go.
Re: Resin Printers don't sell very well. (Score:1)
Try FreeCAD, which does CAM and G-code too. And smoothness is a matter of printing precision and polishing. Just look at how fine it can print.
Ultimately, you'll always have to do some afterwork.
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I'm not the OP, but I use TinkerCAD for most of my modeling. It's not super powerful, but it's very user friendly and easy to learn quickly. It's all done in the browser too and for free!
As far as the smoothness of the prints, that's going to come down to the printer resolution and print settings. I've gotten some surprisingly smooth prints out of a cheapo monoprice mini printer, but you've gotta print in thin layers and at slow speeds. I usually choose to print faster and then sand and/or paint the final p
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What software do you use for design?
If you like mousing try Fusion360. If you like scripting try OpenSCAD or one of its many variants.
Some people swear by Blender and Google/Trimble SketchUp, but only if you like wasting hours or days trying to fix the non-watertight models that they produce. Slicer software needs watertight models otherwise it produces failed prints.
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I had a Laserwriter Plus. A complex page would take upwards of 20 minutes to render, so I didn't print much until I was really ready for final proofing or WYSIWYG checks. That was "slow" but if every print took a whole workshift I wouldn't have gotten it.
When a 3D printer can make 4-6 models per work shift they'll sell much better.
Old Xerox machines needed bottles of toner and before that copy fluid and ink. Today's inkjets and lasers are barely messy by comparison.
If this resin system is really fast and
New? (Score:3, Informative)
This technique (UV rapid resin printing) has been around for years and years.
Here's one from a few years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
There's like hundreds of videos on youtube at least on variants of this technique, all around that same 100-ish times faster than additive printing range of minutes versus hours of print time.
It's cool - but this is like one of those 'revolutionary' battery marketing releases where they ignore the drawbacks and don't mention the dozen times this idea has been pushed before.
Ryan Fenton
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The most important benefit is that pulling a 3D object out of a bath of liquid like that looks waaaaaay cooler than regular 3D printing.
Material Properties (Score:2)
I don't care if the printer is slow if it can make an object out of Nylon with 30% glass fiber reinforcement. (or even better, Inconel! [spacex.com]) That material has good mechanical properties.
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NEXT! (Score:4, Funny)
"no lasers needed"
BOR-ING!
Methinks they weren't trying hard enough to require lasers. Disappointing.
Speed is the least of my consern. (Score:2)
The key issues that have stopped my from getting a 3d printer are the following. (which most of these issues are with affordable models)
1. Reliability. For one that is priced where I can afford it, they all seem to have issues with reliability, things getting clogged, and failed tries.
2. Resolution. I still kinda wish I could have 3d printed something without all the "scan lines"
3. Color and Material. I would love to be able to have 2 or 3 different colors in a print, also perhaps having a mixture of some
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1. Reliability. For one that is priced where I can afford it, they all seem to have issues with reliability, things getting clogged, and failed tries.
Yes, the hobby printers do take a lot of tinkering. That's half the fun though.
2. Resolution. I still kinda wish I could have 3d printed something without all the "scan lines"
Resin printers solve this. The Anycubic Photon is sub-$500. Downsides are smaller build area, consumables cost about twice as much, and there's more of a process in terms of curing and cleanup.
3. Color and Material. I would love to be able to have 2 or 3 different colors in a print, also perhaps having a mixture of some material. Such as a solder or some sort of medal for electrical conductivity, or more rubbery filaments for things that need to be gripped, or more stable.
You can print with dual heads for two colours, or there are now hobby printers that will print multiple colours by retracting one filament and feeding another. Downside is that you can end up with a lot of wastage because the head needs to
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What's stopping me is the 3D modelling part. Maybe I just need to dive in.
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The key issues that have stopped my from getting a 3d printer are the following. (which most of these issues are with affordable models)
1. Reliability. For one that is priced where I can afford it, they all seem to have issues with reliability, things getting clogged, and failed tries.
Cant argue there. I spend equal time workingon/tuning/upgrading my fleet of printers as they spend actually building parts. It's just part of the hobby. You can spend 100k+ for industrial grade printers with sealed filament cans and service plans to get around this, but that's not cost effective.
2. Resolution. I still kinda wish I could have 3d printed something without all the "scan lines"
Here you have options. You can print at a very low resolution (layer height) and they almost vanish at the cost of print speed, you can vapor polish a few different materials, or you can jump into the resin printer
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Everything you're talking about here is on the market at pretty affordable price points. Some of it is a little "hacky" though. While I don't usually praise Makerbot, the replicator 2x does dual color printing pretty effortlessly as long as your ok with processing the models for dual material. There are hot ends that do on the fly mixing, and I've seen but never used printers that take 4+ materials at once.
Switching hotends are much more viable than the mixing hotends currently available. Yes, they are different.
Switching hotends only ever have one filament (color or material) in the hot zone at a time, retracting it entirely to change to a different filament (color or material).
Mixing hotends, on the other hand, can push two or more filaments (color or material) through the hotzone at the same time, but they're notorious for clogging up because retracting filaments tend to draw molten filament back up the PT
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1. Once you get to know a printer and dial it in, it can be fairly reliable, but yea, it's not 100% and not something I'd recommend to anyone who's afraid of taking things apart.
2. Most cheap printers can do 0.08mm layer height. At that height they feel rough but you can't see the layers unless you go looking for them.
3. You can't print solder but there are conductive PLAs and rubbery filaments. Check out the Mosaic Palette, which lets you print more or less flawlessly from 4 spools.
4. Cost gets you mainly
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3. You can't print solder
Sure you can. Have you tried? Sn-Ag-Cu solder melts at 217C which is well within the capabilities of even most Chinese 3D printers.
Removing scan lines with cheap post-processing. (Score:2)
2. Resolution. I still kinda wish I could have 3d printed something without all the "scan lines"
A couple years ago I saw a 3-D printed part post-treated to deal with that, along with strength issues from the filament passes not fully bounding.
Printer user had post-processed it by exposing it to acetone vapor for a while, then letting the solvent evaporate for a day or so. Used a cheap rice cooker. (OUTDOORS, because, in addition to toxicity issues, generating acetone vapor with a heating appliance indoors
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It sounds like you're disappointed that 3D printers aren't Star Trek replicators.
Everyone else has already made good points, so I'll stick to what no one else has said:
I think it's important to realize that they aren't the Star Trek replicators that a lot of enthusiast want to act like they are. They're tools, like a milling machine or a table saw. To make the best of them you have to learn to use them, learn what they're capable of, and what they're good for.
The projects I'm most proud of are the ones th
The actual innovation is selective curing (Score:2, Interesting)
Resin printers have one big problem which is preventing the bottom layer that's being cured from sticking to the bottom of the resin vessel. Traditionally either there's a thin layer of air, some chemical coating or other method from preventing adhesion in the bottom. Additionally, the resin is then shaken between layers to loosen any semi-adhered parts of the print etc.
The Innovation in this article is that not only is light used to cure specific parts of the print, light is also used to PREVENT curing of
OLO Kickstarter (Score:2)
There's already been a Kickstarter for such a device: https://www.kickstarter.com/pr... [kickstarter.com]. I backed it and its been a few years but they seem like they're close to shipping the majority of devices.
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FYI, they renamed to ONO as the OLO name was already taken IIRC.
For more info, as Of Jan 13th they were getting ready to ship out a chunk of devices. They use your smartphone as the light source with a reservoir of light-sensitive resin for printing.
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I backed a similar one called the Peach Printer. It's only been 6 years since it started, and 3 years since the last update. I'm starting to worry a little.
It may be fast, (Score:2)
Congratulations you've invented... (Score:1)
...Stereolithography [wikipedia.org]?
There's an easier way... (Score:2)
If this printing process used only the blue light, it would immediately harden the first bit of resin it encounters in the basin -- the stuff just inside the glass.
So you shine the blue light at the surface, and slowly lower a platform into the resin. A technique which I'm sure is already in use. (It's analogous to selective laser sintering ... hard to shine a laser through metal powder.)
Meanwhile (Score:2)
https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-... [ieee.org]
old (Score:2)