(Commonwealth Union)_Designers and engineers may now more easily personalise projects, make tangible prototypes at various scales and manufacture structures that aren’t possible to produce using more conventional manufacturing methods thanks to advancements in 3D printing. The procedure is slow and requires specific ingredients, most of which must be utilised one at a time, therefore the technique still has its drawbacks.
A 3D printing technique created by Stanford researchers promises to produce prints more quickly by combining various types of resin into a single object. Their concept, which was just published in Science Advances, is five to ten times faster than the fastest high-resolution printing technique now in use and may enable scientists to utilise thicker polymers with superior mechanical and electrical qualities.
According to Joseph DeSimone, the Sanjiv Sam Gambhir Professor in Translational Medicine and Professor of Radiology and Chemical Engineering at Stanford and corresponding author on the article, “this new method will help us fully fulfil the potential of 3D printing.” It will make printing faster and enable the creation of complicated, multi-material products in a single step, ushering in a new era of digital manufacturing.
The new design enhances continuous liquid interface production, or CLIP, a 3D printing technique developed by DeSimone and his associates in 2015. A rising platform gently removes the object, which appears to be fully formed, from a thin resin pool in a process known as CLIP printing. While a layer of oxygen hinders curing at the bottom of the pool and produces a “dead zone” where the resin remains in liquid form, a series of UV pictures transmitted through the pool harden the resin into the proper shape there.
The secret to CLIP’s speed is the dead zone. The liquid resin is designed to fill in behind the solid item as it rises, enabling smooth, continuous printing. However, this isn’t always the case, particularly if the resin is exceptionally sticky or the object rises too quickly. The researchers have put syringe pumps on top of the rising platform for this new technique, known as injection CLIP, or iCLIP, to add extra resin at strategic locations.
According to Gabriel Lipkowitz, a PhD candidate in mechanical engineering at Stanford and the paper’s primary author, “the resin flow in CLIP is a really passive process. You’re essentially dragging the thing up and hoping that suction can transport material to the place where it’s needed.” With this revolutionary technology, resin is actively injected onto the printer’s necessary surfaces.
Conduits that deliver the resin are printed at the same time as the design. In the same way that veins and arteries are incorporated into our own bodies, the conduits can either be removed once the object is finished or they can be included in the design.
