3D Printing

We have looked at volumetric printing before on this website. You may recall that volumetric printing differs from traditional 3D printing as volumetric printing is non-planar; it has no flat layers. With volumetric printing, instead of a layerwise deposition, the laser light is shone into a vat of rotating transparent photopolymer resin, curing the resin into a part as the targeted laser hits the rotating medium. The resin is cured in three dimensions simultaneously, rather than in two dimensions like a normal resin printer. Typically, a resin needs to be transparent for the laser to pass through, but this may be about to change thanks to a team of researchers at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, who have figured out how to print through opaque resins. You can see this demonstrated in the tiny printed Yoda figure below. “Judge me by my size do you, hm?” (Image…    read more 

May 21, 2022 Leave a Comment Researchers at University of Chicago have found a novel way to physically model Earthquakes which have been shown to have a fairly high similarity with computer simulations of Earthquakes. The team realised that during Earthquakes occurring in basin areas, such as that which struck Mexico City in 1985, exhibit more damage around the edge of the basin. Until now, it has been difficult to determine why this may be. But thanks to 3D printing and lasers, the researchers have been able to gain some insight into this phenomenon. Beneath the ground, the earth forms into layers over time. These layers have different material properties. Some are soft like clay, and others are brittle like shale. The interactions between these layers during an earthquake are not so easy to understand. “Simulating all of this is really hard to do, not only because it’s computationally intensive,…    read more 

May 18, 2022 Leave a Comment Wisconsin-based company PrintFoam wants you to stop designing plastic lattices with your fancy generative design and topology optimization software and start designing for foams instead. Afterall, many of the lattices designed in these softwares are just trying to mimic the behavior of foams anyway, with their light densities and whatnot. So why not cut out the middleman and just churn out printed foams? Why not indeed. Because PrintFoam wants you to know that with their newly launched resin-based printed foam system, they can churn out plywood sized sheets of foam in mere minutes, rather than hours. And it’s not just sheets. It’s 3D printing so you can obviously do more complex geometries.Check out the printed foam drone nose in the image below, designed to replace a traditional styrofoam version. Styrofoam vs printed foam. (Image credit: PrintFoam) The system works by …uhhh…. Actually, there isn’t…    read more 

May 13, 2022 Leave a Comment Traditional rockets are incredibly inefficient for a number of reasons, not least due to the fact that they are mostly disposable. But reusability aside, another reason that rockets are inefficient is the fixed geometry of the bell nozzle. Efficient rocket thrust is dependent on the exhaust gas going in the correct direction (opposite to direction of travel, ideally). A bell shaped rocket nozzle (also called a convergent/divergent, or “con-di” nozzle) shapes the exhaust gasses so they flow out in more or less a straight vector. But as it exits the nozzle, the flow encounters the atmosphere, which also shapes the flow. Aerospike engine (Image credit: Hyperganic) At low altitudes, the ambient pressure is enough to tame the flow into a straight path. However, once the altitude increases and the ambient pressure decreases, the pressure affects the flow less and hence the exhaust “expands” as…    read more 

May 4, 2022 Leave a Comment Last week California-based printer company Nexa3D launched their XiP printer, which is generating quite a bit of interest in various circles. Let’s take this launch as an opportunity to look at the company and their high speed resin printers in some more detail. Nexa3D Nexa3D specializes in fast SLA printers, and was co founded by Avi Reichental who also serves as Chairman & CEO of Nexa3D. If that name sounds familiar to you, it should, because he previously served as president and CEO of 3D Systems. Nexa3D has until now offered a range of industrial resin printers that are capable of printing polymers faster than anything on the market. The company achieves this thanks largely to two proprietary technologies, namely Lubricant Sublayer Photo-curing (LSPc) for photoplastics and Quantum Laser Sintering (QLS) for thermoplastics. For the sake of this article and the recently launched XiP…    read more