RepRap Central Announces 2015 3D Printer Challenge
Imagine a 3D printer which features rapid build times, super smooth vertical operation, incredible accuracy, and super quiet operation. The team at RepRap Central, a UK merchant dedicated to the RepRap community, are asking you to take on the challenge of engineering and possibly building just such a machine. They call the idea an FLM printer, or Fused Layer Manufacturing, and the winning entrant will need to complete one full layer at a time using only the vertical Z Axis. You can read the whole story here: http://3dprint.com/39021/reprap-central-flm-challenge/
Let us know if you have entered this contest and feel free to post details of your entry below!
http://3dprint.com/wp-content/upload.../01/RepRap.jpg
Print speed gains essential for mass adoption
Quote:
Originally Posted by
edu3d
Don't DLP based resin printers already do a complete layer at a time? Granted DLP may not be as fast but they do handle one layer at a time. Resin is also expensive so I guess it would depend on what the additional details were.
Layer print needs to be rapid, one of the criteria 50 to a 100 times faster
1 Attachment(s)
3D Systems PlastiJet Printer?
Well, this problem has been percolating in the back of me wee brain for a few days now. In my first posting above, i suggested a single sweep of either the X or Y axis (whichever is the narrower) to lay down a layer in the Z plane:
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I'd be looking to simplify this by first handling two axes at a time, either X || Y && Z. That in itself would be an order of magnitude faster.
Like taskman, i initially thought of a multitude of tiny nozzles pushing out hot plastic. That lead me to the old dot matrix technology and the line printer matrix:
http://3dprintboard.com/attachment.p...tid=4543&stc=1
I was thinking something like this could be adapted, with much hard work, to pushing out hot plastic along an entire row as the horizontal plane was swept. Sounds like you'd end up with a real mess, doesn't it? I thought so, too.
Okay, so what about something like inkjet printing, where tiny blobs of ink are shot onto a planar surface? Well, it turns out that Xerox is still developing something similar, called solid ink printing. I say 'still developing' because the technology has been around since 1987 or so. You'd have thought the whole world would have dropped it by now, but not Xerox.
It's about shooting tiny blobs of primary coloured (yellow, magenta, cyan, and black) wax onto a drum, which is transferred onto your paper. What a great idea. Take out the drum, substitute PLA for wax, and you have the makings of a 3D PLAJet printer, or maybe PlastiJet.
I'm not the first to have thought along those lines though. If you Google "xerox solid ink 3d printer", the first story to come up is: 3D Systems to Acquire a Portion of Xerox's Oregon Based Solid Ink Engineering and Development Teams. They paid 32.6 million dollars for access to Xerox's technology. Imagine that. A 3D PlastiJet printer, which prints a complete Z axis layer in a single pass. The resolution would be ridiculously high and it's in full colour no less!
Is this old news? I keep thinking i must have missed the announcement already. :)
Edit: About a week after posting this, i ran across something called Polyjet printing, which is similar to SLA. This Polyjet process lays down dots of liquid photopolymer which is cured by UV light, almost immediately after being laid down. It looks great, but running at 16 microns (or 0.0006") per layer i expect it takes forever to print a part. I can only assume that these printers are so expensive as to be beyond the means of most consumers. And so, the search goes on.