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MIT team develops 3D printer that's 10x faster than comparable 3D printers

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Re: MIT team develops 3D printer that's 10x faster than comparable 3D printers

#51

Post by snarfy »

slededit wrote: post #4

I wonder why they needed the laser pre-heater. I can't imagine it is that dramatically more effective than resistive heating. Even if it is, just having a longer pre-heater to make up for it would have to be cheaper. EDIT: Did a bit of research, a major benefit of laser heating is direct control of energy transfer so you can be sure your heating the plastic to the right temperature regardless of how fast its moving t…

The temperature needs to be consistent first. There is a PID cycle the nozzle goes through to keep it consistent. If you look at the temperature on a graph during print, it's not a flat line but rather a sine wave as the PID cycles. My printer has an LED that flashes with the heating element, and you can see it work more during heavy extrusion to keep the temperature up. The frequency of the cycle is related to the mass of the nozzle/heater and speed of extrusion. I can only imagine at that speed they could not get a consistent PID loop with a traditional heater.

Re: MIT team develops 3D printer that's 10x faster than comparable 3D printers

#52

Post by brandonjm »

tbenst wrote: post #40

10x faster is a bit exaggerated; maybe 2-3x faster than typical desktop FFF and still slower than HP or Carbon

Just at a glance it looks about 10x faster than my Prusa, but I agree it wouldn't be much more than 2-3x faster than larger scale printers for sure. I don't think Carbon would come under "comparable 3D printers" as it is resin based which is often faster.

Re: MIT team develops 3D printer that's 10x faster than comparable 3D printers

#53

Post by jojoo »

walrus01 wrote: post #47
Animats wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. That's what you get when you build a 3D printer like a CNC machine. Titan takes in pellets directly, rather than bothering with filament. They probably use a heating system and drive screw like an injection molding machine. They can print with more plastics than filament printers. They end up with a lot of moving mass on the print head, but that's what big motors and controllers are for. The Titan unit uses 14…

What is the $ per kilogram cost difference if you can buy bulk PLA plastic pellets vs. buying filament on a roll? For a benchmark comparison figure the generally well-reviewed Monoprice filament ranges from $18 to $20 per 1kg spool.

it's about half as expensive.

Re: MIT team develops 3D printer that's 10x faster than comparable 3D printers

#54

Post by brianwawok »

ngcc_hk wrote: post #11

As hobby goes 3D printer really no good. Laser is fast and even some Cnc ok. But hours and hours ... Hope this help as having a 3D model of your favourite item is great. Especially you can like programming iterate through it quickly. Learning is part of the fun.

Hobby 3D is geat for me. Find some DnD minis I need, load 36 or so to a SD card, go feed into printer, and 24h later I have $100 worth of minis printed for $0.50 in plastic. A $200 ender3 pays for itself real quick.

Re: MIT team develops 3D printer that's 10x faster than comparable 3D printers

#55

Post by brianwawok »

walrus01 wrote: post #46

Regarding "normal" 3d printer technology, anyone who's thinking of getting a basic one to play around with, take a look at the Creality CR-10S. It sells for $369. There's lots of youtube videos of sample output from it and reviews. The bigger version of the same thing which can print 50 x 50 x 50 cm volume, the CR-10S5 is $629. I have no connection to the manufacturer or Chinese vendors, just throwing the name of som…

Ender3 can be found under $200 and is excellent. I think it is similar to the 10s

Re: MIT team develops 3D printer that's 10x faster than comparable 3D printers

#56

Post by liamkinne »

onesun wrote: post #50
slededit wrote: post #4

I wonder why they needed the laser pre-heater. I can't imagine it is that dramatically more effective than resistive heating. Even if it is, just having a longer pre-heater to make up for it would have to be cheaper. EDIT: Did a bit of research, a major benefit of laser heating is direct control of energy transfer so you can be sure your heating the plastic to the right temperature regardless of how fast its moving t…

I'm guessing here, but it could be possible that the actual heating of the filament is done entirely with the laser, and the job of the heated nozzle is simply to keep the filament at temperature all the way until it is extruded. It may have not been possible or feasible to combine the laser heater and nozzle, hence the need for both parts.

When the Laser heats the filament, it's 1.75mm in diameter, so to get it down to the 0.4mm diameter for extrusion a nozzle is still required which also needs some heat so the plastic doesn't resolidify.

Re: MIT team develops 3D printer that's 10x faster than comparable 3D printers

#57

Post by jakobegger »

amelius wrote: post #45
ngcc_hk wrote: post #11

As hobby goes 3D printer really no good. Laser is fast and even some Cnc ok. But hours and hours ... Hope this help as having a 3D model of your favourite item is great. Especially you can like programming iterate through it quickly. Learning is part of the fun.

Well if you order an object online, then you have to wait 1+ days for it to arrive ;)

More like 2 weeks for Shapeways...

Re: MIT team develops 3D printer that's 10x faster than comparable 3D printers

#59

Post by cestith »

pontifier wrote: post #27
thanksDr wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give us an outline?

Sure, the basic idea is to separate data transfer from what I call locking. Data transfer can be done quickly, then locking can happen passively at whatever rate it needs. Data transfer can take many forms. A simple example is an array of needles,pointing downward, forming a horizontal plane. The plane of needles is withdrawn upward through a granular material and dropplets of glue bind the material only where it sho…

This sounds similar to HP's $100k+ solution. There's another similar attempt I've read about recently. It's a form of stereolithography resin printing.

Instead of multiple needles in a granular material it's using multiple fast-aiming lasers pointing into a tank of UV-setting resin. The lasers shoot through a tank of translucent resin from multiple angles and where he beams intersect there's enough energy to set the resin without setting the surrounding bulk of it. A bigger array of lasers means more points can be set at once.

Normal SLA/DLP resin 3D printers already work a plane at a time, drawing up through a tank and having lasers hit that layer right at the surface. A bigger array of lasers means each layer gets set faster up to the limit of the resin's minimum cure time.

Most professional and some high end hobby 3D printers aren't FFD/FMD any longer. Resin, metal sintering, and other alternatives are leaving fused filament to the hobbyists. There's no reason sintering couldn't use more lasers, speeding things up to a practical limit of the metal's time to cool.

Personally, although it's still mostly hobbyist size and speed, I just recently backed a ceramic extrusion printer. It can use a variety of cheap and readily available materials to create heat-resistant, durable, food-safe items. Items can be smoothed and some details added before firing.

For your solution, have you considered a two-part epoxy as an alternate to granules and glues for finer resolution?

Re: MIT team develops 3D printer that's 10x faster than comparable 3D printers

#60

Post by MH15 »

pontifier wrote: post #17

I've got a design for a printer that should be about 10,000 times faster than this. It's really a game of data transfer speed. How fast can you transfer information about solid vs non-solid into space? The velocity and acceleration of that printer is very impressive, but maxing out the movement speed of a single physical nozzle is not going to get us where we need to be in the future. If anyone is interested in colla…

I've built several printers (albeit FDM models) and am interested.
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