South Africa has some impressive 3D printers that have been designed and built here, but they all have one drawback. They’re based on the open source RepRap technology, which means all they work by extruding plastic in thin layers and building a model up. It’s an often slow process which invariably leaves a model with ridges down the side – an aesthetic that’s not altogether unpleasing to the eye, but we can understand why some don’t like it.
Imagine a 3D printer that doesn’t print objects from the bottom up layer by layer, but rather pulls them out of a resin pool, fully-printed.
Carbon3D, the company behind the 3D printer than uses continuous liquid interface production (CLIP) jokes that you might have seen a similar technology before. In one of the popular Terminator films, the T-1000 famously rises from a pool of meat goo, and that is where it got the inspiration from.
But don’t take our slack-jawed word for it – take a look at the video below to see how absolutely amazing the new 3D printing technology works.
The video shows printing at six times the normal speed, so actual printing will be a bit slower.
But it is still faster than normal 3D printers. CLIP reckons it’s between 25 to 100 times faster than a traditional RepRap machine.
“We think that popular 3D printing is actually misnamed — it’s really just 2D printing over and over again. The strides in that area have mostly been driven by mechanical engineers figuring our how to make things layer by layer to precisely create an object. We’re two chemists and a physicist, so we came in with a different perspective,” said Joseph DeSimone, Carbon3D’s co-founder, told the Washington Post in a great breakdown of the technology here.
Still not convinced? Have a look at the Eiffel Tower being pulled seemingly from nothing.
To make something using the CLIP technology, it is a complicated process of light and oxygen. According to The Washington Post, “to create an object, CLIP projects specific bursts of light and oxygen. Light hardens the resin, and oxygen keeps it from hardening. By controlling light and oxygen exposure in tandem, intricate shapes and latices can be made in one piece instead of the many layers of material that usually make up a 3D printed object.”
The process sounds similar to laser sintering, the 3D print process used in high end manufacturing which focuses laser beams into a plastic powder to harden it into the shape of a model. Form 1, a desktop laser sintering machine, behaves similarly to the Carbon3D printer. The Form1 was a successful Kickstarter project and costs around R35 000 to buy in the US.
No price has been put on Carbon3D’s design, but we reckon it will be a while before they become commercially available.
[Source – Washington Post, Via – Fakejon]
