MIT team develops 3D printer that's 10x faster than comparable 3D printers
3ders.org
3ders.org
EDIT: Did a bit of research, a major benefit of laser heating is direct control of energy transfer so you can be sure your heating the plastic to the right temperature regardless of how fast its moving through the heater. Still, aren't all these advantages eliminated by the traditional primary heater immediately after?
I believe it's water cooled but still looks to be using traditional heater cartridges.
I'd once considered heating the surface to which you are bonding with a laser, just ahead of the extruder, so you weld hot surface to hot surface, not hot surface to cold surface. That's why filament type 3D printers make such weak joints between layers.
I'm guessing that absurd power requirement is for the 85C heated enclosure variant, otherwise I'm no idea where the 60amps are going.
I remember reading about a slicer with an option to use the hotend just as a heat source that traced the previous layer to smooth/blend it. Using a laser may be a good method of improving the surface finish as well.
You might also need to be able to tilt the laser up/down to vary the distance from the nozzle.
It should be pretty easy from there to have the computer keep it pointed at wherever the nozzle is going next.
It's also nice because they can vary laser power much more effectively than you can vary the temperature of a conduction surface.
I love this writing style, clear and informative but playful at the same time.
And the press release from last year: http://news.mit.edu/2017/new-3-d-printer-10-times-faster-com...
I run a cannabis company (cbd). My cofounder and I were roommates at MIT. We rarely mention it in our industry.
For the technology as a whole we need something that changes more than a constant factor, i.e. better than O(n^3) because we're still using filament that's time proportional to volume of the object.
This isn't entirely clear cut though. For instance laser printers technically do trace a dot of light across a page, but a single raster scan is almost instantaneous compared to the time scales of larger operations. Not having to physically move a 'print head' seems to be the winning design.
> You should have a thicker machine with tubes and pipes that brings in chemicals. Tubes with controllable valves - all very tiny. What I want is to build in three dimensions by squirting the various substances from different holes that are electrically controlled, and by rapidly working my way back and doing layer after layer, I make a three-dimensional pattern.
Added: since mechanical frequencies scale up as size scales down, this sort of design would ideally scale as O(1). That is, with smaller parts and increasing resolution, you have O(n^2) parts, each working O(n) faster, to produce O(n^3) units times O(n^-3) unit volume = O(1) volume per unit time.
Feynman was looking further out to a machine not limited to one material at a time.
It's a point solution, depositing ~1 voxel per unit of time. Running print heads in parallel is still O(1). Speeding up the print head runs out of steam because you run into vibration limits for the machinery (you can hear the rattling in the audio for this article). To really scale you need to deposit ~n voxels per unit of time (HP's MJF technology) or ~n^2 (Carbon's CLIP).
You need lots of voxels for high resolution for most applications. There are certain exceptions like prototyping in PETG or 3D printing concrete houses where the speed limitations of FFF may not be a big issue. But for 3D printing to compete with many forms of traditional manufacturing, simultaneous parallel structuring of matter is key.
Yes there are DLP printers for enthusiasts, but the multi-stage process is not that great, as the chemicals are pretty noxious.
There are a greater range of cheaper plastics available for extruding.
Hope this help as having a 3D model of your favourite item is great. Especially you can like programming iterate through it quickly.
Learning is part of the fun.
The bigger version of the same thing which can print 50 x 50 x 50 cm volume, the CR-10S5 is $629.
I have no connection to the manufacturer or Chinese vendors, just throwing the name of something I'm satisfied with out there.
Sure it's 10x the speed, but it's almost 100x the price.
A Creality Ender 3 is around $200. This printer, with fiber laser, is around $15-20k.
And the Ender 3 can't make moves that fast. The Atmega chip is just a 16 MHz chip. You can't generate the steps required even using Klipper firmware (which is a bitbanging firmware that uses your desktop CPU as motion planner). You could generate the steps using one of the ARM based boards, but you'd double your BOM - Smoothieboard and Duet both would be around the $150-$200 but can generate the required steps. The BeagleBone Black can generate upwards of 1M steps/sec, which is on the high end of pro-sumer.
It's awesome, but it's a pie-in-the-sky that most of us would never even have the source to buy, let alone approach.
2009 was when the patent expired. And that's when RepRap picked up rather quickly. The patent was handled since 1989 reminded me the same way the Wrights brought avionics to its knees in the US until the US busted the patent for WWI.
To make a 3d printer, all you need is a slow controller for handing gcode, 4 stepper controllers, 4 stepper motors, thermistors, heated bed, and heated tip. Worst case, before being able to buy calibrated filament, you could use weed whacker line, and put in its equivalent diameter
However, one trend I see, is that optics does not lower in price. Sure, lasers have gotten cheaper. But when you talk about 200 laser diodes at 5w each and using a complicated assortment of lenses and glass fiber optics, that stuff's $$$$$. The costs can come down from $50k to $20k, but it's still way out of the reach of 'buy on ebay or amazon'.
Who are those guys, then?
>That picture is neither Jamison nor Professor Hart; and >Jamison Go is a PhD student, not a professor
It's really a game of data transfer speed. How fast can you transfer information about solid vs non-solid into space?
The velocity and acceleration of that printer is very impressive, but maxing out the movement speed of a single physical nozzle is not going to get us where we need to be in the future.
If anyone is interested in collaborating with me, I'd love to talk.
Data transfer can take many forms. A simple example is an array of needles,pointing downward, forming a horizontal plane. The plane of needles is withdrawn upward through a granular material and dropplets of glue bind the material only where it should be hardened. In this example there is a resolution tradeoff, but you can see that the "printing" is basically completed in one pass of the plane through the print volume.
Holographic processes could transfer data to the entire volume at once.
The key is looking at the problem as a data transfer problem. We are very good at moving data very quickly.
Also, glue doesn't set instantaneously. I can see only problems with this approach?
In my imagination I see a chair made from shredded tires, and bonded with a silicon caulking like substance. The shredded tires would be filled into a container between the needles as the printing array rises.
So parallelize!
Are there FDM printers with multiple nozzles extruding in the same plane? That seems like an obvious incremental step from regular single nozzle printers.
https://www.engineering.com/3DPrinting/3DPrintingArticles/Ar...
Instead of multiple needles in a granular material it's using multiple fast-aiming lasers pointing into a tank of UV-setting resin. The lasers shoot through a tank of translucent resin from multiple angles and where he beams intersect there's enough energy to set the resin without setting the surrounding bulk of it. A bigger array of lasers means more points can be set at once.
Normal SLA/DLP resin 3D printers already work a plane at a time, drawing up through a tank and having lasers hit that layer right at the surface. A bigger array of lasers means each layer gets set faster up to the limit of the resin's minimum cure time.
Most professional and some high end hobby 3D printers aren't FFD/FMD any longer. Resin, metal sintering, and other alternatives are leaving fused filament to the hobbyists. There's no reason sintering couldn't use more lasers, speeding things up to a practical limit of the metal's time to cool.
Personally, although it's still mostly hobbyist size and speed, I just recently backed a ceramic extrusion printer. It can use a variety of cheap and readily available materials to create heat-resistant, durable, food-safe items. Items can be smoothed and some details added before firing.
For your solution, have you considered a two-part epoxy as an alternate to granules and glues for finer resolution?
The granular material plus binder combinations are essentially unlimited. I even thought of making 3d printed treats by using sugar with water binder, or rice crispies with a food safe binder.
The printing step would be accomplished in 1 hour. The curing step could happen over a week if need be.