New 3D Printing Technique Is 100 Times Faster Than Standard 3D Printers (ieee.org)

A new 3D-printing technique could render a three-dimensional object in minutes instead of hours -- at up to 100 times current speeds. The experimental approach uses a vat of resin and some clever tricks with UV and blue LED lights (no lasers needed) to accelerate the printing process. From a report: The technique looks almost like a time-reverse film loop of an object dissolving in a reservoir of acid. But instead of acid, this reservoir contains a specially-designed resin that hardens when exposed to a particular shade of blue light. Crucially, that hardening (the technical term is polymerization) does not take place in the presence of a certain wavelength of UV light. The resin is also particularly absorbent at the wavelengths of both the blue and UV light. So the intensity of UV or blue light going in translates directly to the depth to which light will penetrate into the resin bath. The brighter the light beam, the further it penetrates and the further its effects (whether inhibiting polymerization in the case of UV light, or causing it in the case of blue light) will be felt in the bath along that particular light path.

Timothy Scott, associate professor of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan, says the way to get a 3D-printed object out of this process is to send UV light through a glass-bottomed basin of resin. Then, at the same time, through that same glass window, send patterns of bright and dim blue light. If this printing process used only the blue light, it would immediately harden the first bit of resin it encounters in the basin -- the stuff just inside the glass. And so each successive layer of the object to be printed would need to be scraped or pulled off the window's surface -- a time-consuming and potentially destructive process.

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[Anonymous Coward]

https://www.ted.com/talks/joe_...

Resin Printers don't sell very well.

[MindPrison]

I love the speed of these 3D printers using Resin, but as a Long-time 3D printing fanatic, I never got one as they are messy, expensive (resin is still hideously expensive) and fairly toxic.

Normal PLA printing is slow, but not terribly slow for hobbyist, I can print a 14 x 14 x 14cm at 100my in less than 9 hours, and that's fairly speedy. If you ever want to have mass production of this, you can use it as a prop for injection molding later, and you can make as many copies as you want, dirt cheap.

PLA printers are a big hit with the consumers, just here where I live - our local hardware chain imports thousands of them every year because they're increasing in popularity, they're cheap, they're fairly easy to maintain now, the PLA filament is dirt-cheap but very environmentally friendly as it's just basically Corn Starch. You can have your commercial 3D printer next to your computer like you had your laser printer in the good old days, and have more fun than ever. I can't even imagine life without my little 3D printing workhorse now. Spare parts for the appliance that broke in the house? No problem. Last time I printed with flexible filament to make a couple of rubber fittings for my kitchen ventilator, the light fixture broke (it's over 30 years old), and the cover plastic that covers it, tabs broke. Took me 10-15 minutes to measure and design an improved flexible insert - 50 minutes to print with a traditional Fusion Filament printer, and done.

Same with my 3D characters, I've been wanting to hold those in my hands for 10+ years, and today it's as easy as a little patience. Takes way longer to order them somewhere and finally get them by mail. 3D printing speed issues isn't that much of an issue unless you're talking workshop speeds where you need it to meet the demands of visitors in eg. a store printing figurines or gimmicks on demand. Kind of like the old 1-hour photo for passports in the old days.

That said, I'd love a super speedy 3D printer (who wouldn't?) - but it has to be user friendly, non-messy and with cheap materials.

Re:Resin Printers don't sell very well.

[MindPrison]

>What software do you use for design?

Blender, it's fully open source, free for everyone to use, for whatever purpose.

>What filaments do you like?

I love regular PLA, there are of course quality variations, but I've found that various colors have various temperature tolerances, too much to mention here, but the blue color PLA seems to be the most solid, and easiest to work with, gives the cleanest results. Not all blues are alike, the transparent ones tend to clog up the nozzles and I use those for transparent purposes, for example when I need a button on a device with a LED light behind it.

I like flexible filaments, but even they come in many variations, too many to mention, some are flexible, but won't flex "back" into their original form if they get flexed too much etc, I absolutely love the "glow-in-the-dark" filaments, I often use that for outlines and for special effects on various things - but they have their drawbacks too, such as being brittle and hard on the nozzles..

Resin printers tend to have the best surfaces of them all, but you still need to use some kind of solution to fixate them so they "dilute" the material, sort of "melt" them a little, you can also bake PLA in an oven around 100c to harden them, but they will shrink a little in size as the price for this.

You can achieve almost Resin like resolution on good commercial 3D printers, my flashforge can compete quite easily with a resin printer, but only when I make the printer print extremely slowly, I rarely need that as I usually print big - but i've made many tests, and it works, they're THAT good today, but it takes patience, learning to know the temperatures of the various filaments, and your printers nozzle quality play a part too, as well as your printers resolution of the stepper motors, accuracy etc. Don't get fooled into believing that a printer costing 10 x as much will give you better results, it's mostly up to you, experimentation and some patience.

For absolute accuracy, nothing beats a resin printer though. If you want to make jewellery models, a resin printer would be the way to go.