3D Printing Growth

As I have discussed in an earlier blog post, there are strong signs that the 3D printing industry will continue to have exponential growth for years to come.

In the next several years it is reasonable to expect the technology of 3D printing to improve significantly. Right now the biggest opportunities for improvement are found in improving speed and cost.

There are many segments of manufacturing that could benefit from the versatility of 3D printing. One could imagine 3D printers being on location at plants and in the field in order to create a quick fix part while a replacement part is ordered. A recent extreme example is the addition of an experimental 3D printer on the International Space Station. Also, 3D printers hold the promise of bringing the power of mass production to small scale businesses, once costs come down enough.

Recently a team of researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill made a breakthrough that significantly reduces 3D printing times. It's innovations such as these that will make such dramatic growth in 3D printing possible. Check out the Scientific American article on the breakthrough below:

Chemical Technique Dramatically Speeds Up 3-D Printing

With a trick of chemistry, researchers have sped up, and smoothed, the process of three-dimensional (3D) printing, producing objects in minutes instead of hours. 3D printers typically build one horizontal layer at time. Some do so by depositing droplets of building material as if they were laying tiny bricks. Others create their products by shining ultraviolet rays up into a bath of liquid resin. The light solidifies the resin, and the partial product is pulled upwards one notch to repeat the process for the next layer below. Objects appear to materialize out of the bath, just as the shape-shifting robot in the 1991 science-fiction film Terminator 2 formed out of liquid metal.

But both types of processes can take several hours or even a day to produce a complex structure. A team led by Joseph DeSimone, a chemist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has now refined the liquid-resin process to make it go continuously rather than in fits and starts. They made the bottom of the container that holds the resin bath from a material that is permeable to oxygen. Because oxygen inhibits the solidification of resin, it creates a 'dead zone'-a layer just tens of microns thick at the bottom of the container-where the resin stays liquid even when ultraviolet rays are shining on it. The solidification reaction happens instead just above the dead zone. Because liquid is always present below the slowly forming object, the researchers can pull it up in a continuous manner, rather than waiting for new liquid resin to flow in.

Article Continues Here (Check out a video of the 3D Printer at the bottom of the article, it's at 7x speed)