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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

#61

Post by pontifier »

StavrosK wrote: post #36
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…

10,000 times faster at printing a single object?

The conceptual targets are printing a chair sized object from granular material in 30 seconds, and a 2 story concrete house in 1 hour, so 10,000 is a very rough "shock marketing number", but yeah.

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

#62

Post by falcolas »

snarfy wrote: post #51
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 m…

FWIW, a sin wave is usually a sign of a simple threshold based controller, not a PID loop (or if it is a PID loop, it's very poorly tuned). A well tuned pid loop will not exhibit any periodic tendencies, though I would expect that it would exhibit changes as the filament extrusion is stopped and started.

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

#63

Post by jstanley »

Animats wrote: post #35
Ardren wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Titan 3D Robotics has a extruder that claims to be able to print 1 pound of filament an hour which for ABS would be able 400 cm^3 (I think?) I believe it's water cooled but still looks to be using traditional heater cartridges. Specs: http://www.titan3drobotics.com/atlas/ Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKPKIGcrlFU

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's the best way to keep the laser pointed just in front of the nozzle?

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

#64

Post by pontifier »

cestith wrote: post #59
pontifier wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Have you seen the subsurface laser engravers that create those 3d acrylic point cloud portrait things? I looked into them while doing some research on this. They basically use a focusing lens to create the hotspot at a point within the block of acrylic. They can do up to 20,000 points per second in a plane by aiming some galvos, and the material is moved slowly to create the 3rd dimension.

The granular material plus binder combinations are essentially unlimited. I even thought of making 3d printed treats by using sugar with water binder, or rice crispies with a food safe binder.

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

#65

Post by crankylinuxuser »

I saw this 2 years ago. Long story short, you need a fiber laser and a driving circuit to do this.

Sure it's 10x the speed, but it's almost 100x the price.

A Creality Ender 3 is around $200. This printer, with fiber laser, is around $15-20k.

And the Ender 3 can't make moves that fast. The Atmega chip is just a 16 MHz chip. You can't generate the steps required even using Klipper firmware (which is a bitbanging firmware that uses your desktop CPU as motion planner). You could generate the steps using one of the ARM based boards, but you'd double your BOM - Smoothieboard and Duet both would be around the $150-$200 but can generate the required steps. The BeagleBone Black can generate upwards of 1M steps/sec, which is on the high end of pro-sumer.

It's awesome, but it's a pie-in-the-sky that most of us would never even have the source to buy, let alone approach.

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

#66

Post by pontifier »

MH15 wrote: post #60
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.

Email me at gmail, and we can talk

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

#67

Post by oliveshell »

jstanley wrote: post #63
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's the best way to keep the laser pointed just in front of the nozzle?

Not the parent commenter, but I imagine mounting it so it rotates around the nozzle’s axis would work. Fiber optics would help if the laser unit is too big to have swinging around on the print head.

You might also need to be able to tilt the laser up/down to vary the distance from the nozzle.

It should be pretty easy from there to have the computer keep it pointed at wherever the nozzle is going next.

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

#69

Post by ravedave5 »

crankylinuxuser wrote: post #65

I saw this 2 years ago. Long story short, you need a fiber laser and a driving circuit to do this. Sure it's 10x the speed, but it's almost 100x the price. A Creality Ender 3 is around $200. This printer, with fiber laser, is around $15-20k. And the Ender 3 can't make moves that fast. The Atmega chip is just a 16 MHz chip. You can't generate the steps required even using Klipper firmware (which is a bitbanging firmwa…

Don't forget all 3d printers were 15k not that long ago.
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