With $100M in Funding, Carbon3D Will Make 3D Manufacturing a Reality | Hacker News Reader

With $100M in Funding, Carbon3D Will Make 3D Manufacturing a Reality

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58 pointsfalcor8445 comments

“This is the first 3D printing tech that really has the potential to break out of the prototyping realm that 3D printing has been relegated to until now”

Nope. 3D printing has been there for quite a while already: it is being used quite massively in the aerospace industry, and not for prototyping...

SpaceX prints parts of their engines too.

http://www.spacex.com/news/2014/07/31/spacex-launches-3d-pri...

Many think of 3D printing taking over low-cost high-volume production. In that area there are real economic and tech hurdles. But, the niche of 3d printing in the aerospace industry (or any low volume, high-cost, high-complexity parts) is akin to Tesla first building the Roadster in a high-margin, high-performance auto market before trying to expand out to more general markets. It's a good sign, and moving from prototyping shapes to some form of printing for actual part use is the most interesting aspect of the maturing of 3d printing.

Another example: http://www.geaviation.com/company/additive-manufacturing.htm...

I don't think it's ever going to compete with injection molding on a cost basis.

Edit: That is, where injection molding is applicable today. 3D printers do fill a niche for low-volume runs.

If you stack it up against the just the manufacturing step, I agree completely. But in certain niches, if you compare against the manufacture, transport, inventory, logistics costs etc, then maybe there's a few more areas where 3d printing may be an advantage. If you can actually print structurally usable parts on demand, why dedicate a longer more complex logistics chain. e.g. is there a trade to be made between carrying a network of warehouses full of parts and a printer with a database of those parts right near the consumption point?

In all practicality, you can only do this with a very narrow range of parts, even if you could get direct finished looking structural parts out of a 3D printer (which right now, many times you can't exactly ...).

examples / links?

Over 1,000 parts of the A350XWB are 3d printed using a specific resin (called ULTEM 9085) with interesting properties for the purpose of building an airliner: it's light, strong, and FST (flame, smoke, and toxicity) compliant. [1]

Replying to another post, it might not be very high volume, but it certainly isn't prototyping: it's in production in a very heavily regulated sector. More impressive to me than mass producing for example 10,000,000 key holders a month.

[1] http://3dprint.com/63169/airbus-a350-xwb-3d-print/

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-07/12/3d-printed-pl... "Airbus plans to have 3D printed components in the cabins of its A380s by the end of 2012. Its Eurofighter Typhoon military jet already has some internal 3D printed components."

Of course, those might be comparatively boring parts, like radio covers and plastic ducting. You won't be able to 3D print a working jet fighter in your garage for at least 5 years, maybe more :)

Those are also low-value, low-volume parts. 3D printing works for minor components when you are only building a couple of hundred planes a year, but the 3D parts themselves have almost no value whatsoever compared to the final product.

"The Boeing company has been utilizing SLS for flight hardware in regular production since 2002, for both military and commercial programs"

http://www.naefrontiers.org/File.aspx?id=31590

GE Aviation has already pushed selective laser sintering – a form of 3D printing – further than anyone else, announcing on 15 July that a factory in Alabama will be the first to mass-produce jet engine parts using an additive manufacturing process.

That factory will build fuel nozzles for the CFM Leap-1, which combines a core made by GE and a low-pressure section from Snecma. GE is now evaluating a different 3D printing process to build LPT blades for the GE9X – the engine selected to power the Boeing 777X, and the engine maker’s most complex propulsion system yet.

http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/analysis-ge-ponder...

Wow, that's a lot of funding for just another resin 3d printer. We have had printers like Form1 in the low-cost segment.

I'm surprised about the funding amount, as the market is currently very very stagnating.

Their method of manufacturing is different than others. It makes the process faster, allows for greater detail, eliminated the issue of having layers which weakens the structure, and it allows for much more complex designs without the need for temporary structures.

I think their funding is well placed and will indeed give the 3d printing industry a shake up on the consumer market.

Different from other resin printers? It doesn't seem different than them, at least from this material.

Quantitative improvement, not qualitative. They don't need to separate the resin from the base plate after every layer, which means vastly improved speed and precision and much less complexity. It's the difference between a car that can go 5 miles per hour and a car that can go 50 miles per hour - only quantitative improvement, but now you have a reason to use it every day.

Of course, in manufacturing they're competing against injection molding, which can go a metaphorical 100,000 miles per hour.

But has its significant limitations, notably that it takes a colossal machine and days to weeks to design, optimize, and machine a mold. Injection molding works great if you want to get to Pluto, but it'll cost you two years, a partnership with NASA, and a thousand tons of LH2 and LOX, and that cost remains constant even you just want to hit the supermarket. Current 3d printers can get you to the grocery store pretty well, but you're out of luck for anything bigger.

Carbon3d offers a new middle ground - fast enough and good enough for small production runs, but without the titanic constant-time overhead demanded by injection molding. This isn't going to be used for parts that you need ten million of. It'll be used for parts that you need a few hundred of.

Seems like there is a huge opportunity for 3d printing injection molds. It's probably more a tool chain question than an actual 3d printing question. But, by reducing the cost gap from mid-scale 3d printing to full scale production seems like a large potential net win. AKA, if the costs are similar at 10k and drop after that.

Injection molds need to be ridiculously precise, as in 1/1000 of an inch of can render it useless. Also, I have doubts that the layered result of 3-D printing can hold up to the extreme abuse these things get put through after tens or even hundreds of thousands of cycles. We are talking about foot thick plates of steel bending and warping from fatigue damage after a while. Even if you could 3-D print the bulk of it, the job of polishing and detail work would still need to be done manually.

Edit: after Reading the comment below, I admit I may be somewhat biased from working with more complex and detailed parts with very right tolerances, so there may be some applications where it is feasible. All the molds I've seen/worked with were made the old fashioned way.

tens or even hundreds of thousands of cycles

If it's reasonably cheap to print, then only lasting say 2,000 cycles would not prevent a useful mid-scale production runs. Also, the high end of 3d printing is a lot tougher and has tighter tolerances than you might think.

http://www.gizmag.com/ge-fires-up-all-3d-printed-jet-einge/3...

3d printing of injection molds is already being used for some low volume medical products.

It prints about 100 times faster than other SLA printers.

http://carbon3d.com/

That's the impression I get. It's certainly better than traditional SLA, but still maintains all of SLA's major disadvantages (material/consumable/machine cost, low speed, resin smell/fumes/toxicity, general mess, part decay/degradation over time, limited materials). The tech might take over the SLA space, but I doubt they'll take a significant bite out of other printing processes.

> low speed

This is one of the primary things they advertise most improvement on. Their graphic[1] shows massive speed increases.

I don't know about most of the things you've mentioned, but it also looks like it provides far higher quality output than other products, given that it uses continuous deposition and the projector is precise enough to form smooth curved surfaces.

[1] http://3dprinting.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Carbon3D-CL...

Whoops, you're right - it does have speed benefits. That said, I really doubt that chart they're showing off. I know our SLA machines could print something significantly larger than the maximum object size on the Carbon3D machine in less than the 11.5 hours they list. I would like it see what the actual test case is.

I don't know what the test case is, but going from the article[1], at 100µm layers it prints at 500 mm/hour.

Form 1+ claims 10 to 30 mm/hour at this resolution, so Carbon3D is 20-50 times the speed. That puts Form 1+ about 2-3 times as good as the graph suggests.

CLIP (Carbon3D's name for their tech) isn't layer-rate limited, but cure-rate limited so the comparison isn't quite fair.

[1] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6228/1349.abstract (free access if you sign up for an account)

I dunno. Seems about right these days for the "cool" factor.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

That video looked pretty magical to me.

> That video looked pretty magical to me.

Is that the first resin-based printer you've seen? Because I agree, they look pretty cool. But this one doesn't look particularly different, just faster.

You do realize they were on the cover of Science Magazine? I don't understand how people think there is nothing technically new here when one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals in the world features your paper on its front page....

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6228.cover-expansion

There is a trite, but not completely inaccurate statement about Science: if it gets published there, it's likely to be sexy and wrong.

There is a TED talk by one of the founders with a little bit more detail on what makes their printer different.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihR9SX7dgRo

Thanks for sharing that. I've seen various demos (speed-accelerated videos) of this before, and this was the first time I've seen it in realtime, happening on the stage. It really... does look real.

Very hype heavy article. No mention of Form Labs who is already on the market with a similar product.

Basically, it's another SLA printer, but they use an improved chemistry to speed up the process.

Autodesk, which now builds a 3D SLA printer for about $5000, has been experimenting with chemistries in that area.[1] They give more info about the materials used and the results.

[1] http://www.instructables.com/id/Continuous-Top-Down-DLP-Expe...

This could be really good for optimized lattice structures:

http://www.altair.com/newsdetail.aspx?news_id=11109&news_cou...

> Instead of using steel to build certain high-strength components of an airplane, for instance, Carbon3D would be able to 3D print a lightweight alternative by shaping plastic into a form previously impossible to manufacture.

This is what I'm most curious about. More specifically, I wonder if Carbon3D's device could be used for something similar to what Julia Greer is working on at Caltech (the nanotruss materials).

Its crazy as just a few months ago the thesis convergance for much of Silicon Valley was that investing in 3D printing was very much 2014...Sure this one has faster builds but given that they aren't first movers and have substantial competition, it's surprising to see so much capitol being pumped in. Perhaps stratesys or one of the other big guys will want in so the investment makes sense?

The previous HN discussion has some nice links to published articles on the tech, and good discussion about the advantages of their approach over traditional layer-based stereolithography (including e.g. Form Labs).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9215890

I like this 1.5 minute video on the technology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3TgmvV2ElQ

Whether the economics ultimately work or not, it's an incredibly compelling demo.

There is an Australian company making something similar. http://www.gizmo3dprinters.com.au/ They expect to launch their kickstarter project by end of year.

Anyone have more info on the different materials the article mentions? on the carbon3d.com website they have a couple short clips about elastic or durable, but that is about it.

Isn't a problem with these resin printers that the resin is quite toxic as well as the fumes? Also I think there needs to be some post chemical processing.

Yes (to be fair, it is getting better as better formulations are developed). Additionally, resin is expensive and the parts degrade and become brittle and fragile over time. Their innovation is very cool, but it won't be displacing FDM any time soon.

Is there any way for this technology to do multi-material or multi-color prints ? how ?

I have no idea if it's possible, but I could imagine maybe a multi-frequency light source where each frequency interacts with a unique color molecule in the resin to mix colors individually?

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