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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.
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.
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.
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)
it apperently also eliminates layers, thus making the material stronger and smoother, that's big
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.