Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
New additive manufacturing technology unveiled by a Silicon Valley startup on Monday draws inspiration from the iconic scene in Terminator 2 in which the villainous T-1000 robot starts off as a puddle of liquid metal before emerging in a fully-formed humanoid shape.
The resemblance between the movie and the 3D printing technology developed by Carbon3D is no accident, according to the Washington Post: Joseph M. DeSimone, CEO of the company and a professor at both the University of North Carolina (UNC) and North Carolina State University (NCSU), and his colleagues drew inspiration from that exact cinematic moment.
Moves at a fast clip
The technology, which was unveiled this week during a TED Talk conference and a new study published online Monday in the journal Science, presents an alternative to the layer-by-layer 3D printing approach used by most additive manufacturing systems, the company explained. It uses a “continuous liquid interface production” to generate “monolithic polymeric parts up to tens of centimeters in size with feature resolution below 100 micrometers.”
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It’s a radically different approach to 3D printing, Phys.org explained – one that makes it possible for objects to rise up from a liquid source at a steady rate instead of being fabricated one layer at a time. It reportedly would make it possible for ready-to-use products to be built at least 25 times and up to 100 times faster than existing additive manufacturing technologies, and also makes it possible to create geometric designs that had not previously been possible.
Known as Continuous Liquid Interface Production (CLIP), the technology manipulates oxygen and light to fuse together objects in liquid media, replacing the layer-by-layer type of 3D printing with tunable photochemistry, the website noted. Light beams are projected through an oxygen-permeable window and into a liquid resin, and combined they control the solidification process, allowing the resin to be transformed into objects one-fourth as wide as a sheet of paper.
“By rethinking the whole approach to 3D printing, and the chemistry and physics behind the process, we have developed a new technology that can create parts radically faster than traditional technologies by essentially ‘growing’ them in a pool of liquid,” DeSimone explained at opening session of the TED Talk, held March 16 in Vancouver, according to Phys.org.
[STORY: The history of 3D printing]
“CLIP can allow us to make stronger objects with unique geometries that other techniques cannot achieve, such as cardiac stents personally tailored to meet the needs of a specific patient,” he added. “Since CLIP facilitates 3D polymeric object fabrication in a matter of minutes instead of hours or days, it would not be impossible within coming years to enable personalized coronary stents, dental implants or prosthetics to be 3D printed on-demand in a medical setting.”
Also…cars
In addition to its potential healthcare and medical uses, Carbon3D is confident that CLIP can be used in other fields, including the aviation and automotive industries. The process could be used to design a vast array of 3D parts with unique properties, including elastomers, silicones, nylon-like materials, ceramics and biodegradable materials, the company noted.
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“We think that popular 3D printing is actually misnamed – it’s really just 2D printing over and over again,” DeSimone told the Post. “The strides in that area have mostly been driven by mechanical engineers figuring out 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.”
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