My English Diary: What if 3D printing was 100x faster?

Joseph DeSimone, chemist and inventor, spoke about the potential of 3D printing.

He worked for the last two years in the additive manufacturing area. 

In the video below he showed a particular piece witch was very complex. It is not manufacturable by traditional manufacturing techniques. It is manufacturable by 3D printing, but most 3D printers would take at least 3-4 hours to fabricate it.

DeSimone said 3D printing was a misnomer.; it is in fact 2D printing over and over, in fact it used the technologies associated with 2D printing.

He and his staff of inventors (2 chemists, 2 material scientists and one physicist) began to be interested in 3D printing and inspired by “Terminator 2” where an object (T-1000) arise out of a puddle in real time.

Their challenge was to create a 3D printer like “Terminator 2”, 

but they had to solved a big issue:

Velocity: “there are mushrooms that grow faster than 3D printed part” he joked. 

The layer by layer process is very slowly, if we expedited this process, we would be allowed to start using materials that are "self-curing". 

They started to use a polymer to harness light and oxygen to make parts grow. They used light to convert liquid resin to a solid and the oxygen instead, to inhibit this process.

They made a CLIP (Continuous Liquid Interface Production) consisting of three parts:

1. -          A reservoir that holds a puddle, just like the T-1000;
2. -          A special window at the bottom of the reservoir. This window is a composite. It's not only transparent to light, but it’s permeable to oxygen like a contact lens.
3. -          A digital ultraviolet light projection system under the window.

After that they made a sophisticated software to control the production process and the many variables like oxygen content, the light, the light intensity, the viscosity and the geometry of the piece to make.

The result was staggering. This machine was 25-100 times faster than a traditional 3D printer, with the possibility to go faster in the future (they believe almost 1000 times faster).

In addition, they eliminated the layer and the parts were monolithic. 

They could make pieces with great mechanical properties like high elasticity, high dampening, incredible strength or high strength to weight ratio.

Link: What if 3D printing was 100x faster?