A new innovation in 3D printing could make the process up to 100 times faster than before owing its inspiration to a scene from the classic sci-fi film ‘Terminator 2: Judgement Day’
The new ‘layerless’ method is called “continuous liquid interface production technology”, or CLIP.
Some have compared the method to that used to make killer androids in the hit film Terminator 2.
The company, Carbon3D, came out of two years of stealth mode this week with a TED talk and the simultaneous publication of a paper in Science.
It places a pool of liquid resin over a digital light projection system which harnesses light and oxygen to grow the resin into a solid object instead of the usual layer-by-layer printing process.
Carbon3D have unveiled a new process for printing which could be up to 100 times faster than previous technology, according to a study published in the journal Science.
The new technology could be used in industrial applications in the next year.
“We think that popular 3D printing is actually misnamed – it’s really just 2D printing over and over again,” said Joseph DeSimone, a professor of chemistry at the University of North Carolina and one of Carbon3D’s co-founders.
“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.”
“Our CLIP technology offers the game-changing speed, consistent mechanical properties and choice of materials required for complex commercial quality parts.”
The Science article states: “We delineate critical control parameters and show that complex solid parts can be drawn out of the resin at rates of hundreds of millimetres per hour.
“These print speeds allow parts to be produced in minutes instead of hours.”
Watch this video explaining how the printer works:
