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New 3D Printing Process Claimed To Be 25X Faster Than Current Technology
ErnieKey writes: Carbon3D, a startup based in Redwood City, CA. has just announced a new breakthrough 3D printing technology called Continuous Liquid Interface Production technology (CLIP). The process works by using oxygen as an inhibiting agent as a UV light rapidly cures a photosensitive resin (abstract). "Conventional 3D printers usually take several hours to print an object — because with most printing methods, they need to individually treat each new layer of material after it's put down so that the next layer can be put down on top of it. The new method is much faster because it works continually, instead of in layers, eliminating this step. As a result, it works in minutes, rather than hours — 25 to 100 times faster, its creators say, than conventional 3D printing." The company has just emerged from stealth mode and announced that they have raised a staggering $41 million to further develop the process and bring it to market.
Reinvented. With resins. Neat.
I'll wait for a 48x or 52x speed
Huh? This basically works the same as existing laser-based stereolithography printers (see the FormLabs Form 1), except that this one uses a projector instead of a scanning laser. Basically it cures an entire layer at a time instead of having a laser trace out each layer, resulting in a large speed increase.
The problem with UV sensitive resins is that UV light continues to affect the material even after it's hardened.If you keep it in sunlight it will start to degrade the material and get brittle.
It seems pretty straightforward, they carefully control the amount of oxygen at the bottom of the machine relative to the cross sectional area of the portion being printed so that the rate of polymerisation matches the the volume of plastic being drawn out of the unit. In a normal machine, after you cure a portion, you give it time to cure because throwing more energy at the resin will cause blooming and lack of resolution. This limits the amount cured chemically. Think of it as analagous to magnetic optical recording. Increasing your write current on a normal wite head increases the area written to, but the laser limits the area affected.
It still prints in layers, it's just printing the entire layer simultaneously, using projected UV light, rather than running a flattened tube of material over the entire surface. It's a pretty cool way to print a small prototype-y model.
I'm curious, would that approach be able to scale to multiple colours? The object is fully suspended within the liquid material whilst printing, so I'm guessing it would have to drain the pool, clean the excess fluid from the in-progress model, refill the pool, re-submerge the model, print a bit, and repeat. Which sounds slow and error-prone.
Also curious, how many other substances are there that have similar properties (that is, they can transition from liquid to solid via radiation exposure).
If you look at the video you see that the surface layer is not flat but the surface tension of the liquid changes the shape of the surface layer. They must either be able to accurately predict this effect or they need to somehow measure the shape of the surface.
Jan
Did anyone else notice that the last two digits only counted up to 60? They sped the video up to make minutes look like seconds. Sure it is faster than additive printing but 6 minutes 35 seconds to make a small model is much slower than injection molding.
You are close byt not quite. The breakthrough is explained as follows;
Meanwhile, oxygen prevents this reaction from occurring — so to stop the object from simply hardening and sticking to the floor of the pool, there's a layer of dissolved oxygen there, creating an ultra-thin "dead zone" at the very bottom.
The light is projected through a very thin layer at the bottom without curing. The resin at almost the bottom is cured. The light never reaches the top layer. I you look closely at their graphic you will see the object almost reaches the bottom of the container.
Current systems print from the top. After each layer the object is lowered and resin flows over the top and a new layer is drawn. Sometimes the object has to be sunk and then brought back to the surface which slows production.
In the new method the object is drawn on the bottom of the pool and as the object is drawn up out of the pool more resin flows in much faster than on the top.
I'm surprised at how many people are getting this wrong.
Having a non-curing buffer layer at the bottom of the tank means the resin doesn't "stick" eliminating the need for the "peeling" step after every layer. This means rather than:
cure -> lift to de-laminate (several mm) -> re-position with ~1um accuracy -> cure
it's now:
cure -> lift a few um -> cure.
Eliminating the need to de-laminate every single layer from the base means you can essentially print as fast as you can sure the resin, combine with a dedicated UV projector rather than the usual consumer grade stuff these things use, and maybe some inter-slice interpolation to make the process pseudo-continuous rather than made of discreet layers and I can see a 25x speed increase as being entirely realistic.
Specifically, how is this different from other projector based stereolithography printers such as the muve3d DLP (http://www.muve3d.net/press/)?
You are right. I was unaware that projection with polymers were already a known method. We searched for 3D printers that do a complete layer at once some time ago when we developed our process and found none. We just began testing LCD panels and UV backlight. It is a sinle layer at a time, UV polymer isn't actually the fastest method I have discovered. It is possible to do it with much greater precision and higher speed using different methods. I put up a video a month ago about this (LCD) technique on my web site moteyways.com. I don't think this is very innovative and 41M$ is hardly staggering, but surprising for something with so little innovation. Structure is the least useful printable thing. We are working on printing a new type of CPU and the technology will be documented on the site. It is all to be open hardware. I think that a printer that can print circuits is the application that makes 3D printing a useful thing instead of a play-doh factory or glue gun. I realize it can be a tool for lost wax to metal, but many other tools are better suited to manufacturing structural items. I saw a piezoelectric lathe designed in Japan that can cut almost any material in a 5 axis system with astounding precision. Piezo systems can operate at Angstrom scale ( with huge forces ) and I can attest to that as it is the same method I use in my atomic force scope.
I bet at first they wanted to call it Continuous Liquid Interface Technology (CLIT)
The detail on the electron micrographs at the bottom is really good.
That kind of level of detail fundamentally changes not just how fast you can print (which is just a matter of time), but what you can do with it. Imagine suspeding catalyst particles in the resin and printing fluid channels with incredibly large surface areas. Or other things that require lots of detail.
Changing WHAT you can do is more interesting than how fast you can do it.
$41M in bitcoins on a thumbdrive would weigh much less.