Continuous Liquid Interface Production

[AaliyahFmax]

I stumbled into this little gem of an article on washington post about a new 3D printing device. I was so excited to blog about it, but thought maybe it needs more mulling over before really blowing the hype out of proportion. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/s...ter-literally/ Any thoughts or feedback? I'm not really sure if this is more viable than the 3D printers we have in the market today, but it looks definitely more awesome.

[YYCADM]

I was reading about it yesterday as well. My initial thought was it's good good to be true...then I took a look at who has invested in it, and for how much.
Those folks are no fools, and regardless of how you slice it, $41,000,000 of their clients money is nothing to be spent unwisely. I think it's the real deal. The big question in my mind is what the business model is going to look like. Will this ever be marketable to individual users like a Makerbot or the like, or is the intention to keep this in the realm of corporate level rapid prototyping.

There would be benefits to both, I'd think it will depend on how quickly the investors are expecting to see positive return cash flow. It's pretty amazing technology...now if they can manage to increase strength, heat resistance, etc. to the end product over and above what's currently around, it could be a real game changer, I'd think

[taskman]

It is interesting. The prints I saw had small features/structures/pipes. I would like to see them printing a flat item that way.

The attached image (middle) was printed on a top down without resting between layers and without deep dipping. I printed it at an angle.

The print didn't come out great, but I think if I printed small structures like they did it will look much better. I will see if I can try that this weekend maybe. Could possibly work well with small structures and a tiny vat so that there is less fluid that needs to stabilize after moving the build plate.

[richardphat]

I am sorry but I must have missed something, what's so interesting about this DLP?

[taskman]

They are trying to say they don't need to wait between layers. They display layers without pauses so it is a continues movement of the build plate. For top down: Currently we normally dip down to cover the build plate with resin then move back up again, wait for the resin to stand still then display a layer. Bottom up: Display the layer, move up a bit, dip down again, wait for a bit then display the layer again. They say they are able to move the Z without ever stopping. Helps that the features are 1mm thick. I am going to try the same as what they did, but with 4L of resin in my vat I think it might work better with my micro vat that will have 0.7L of resin. We will see.