Wednesday, March 18, 2015

New 3D printing technology

Typical 3D printers produce objects a layer at a time, either by melting plastic, sintering metal, or solidifying light cured resin – basically 2D printing iterated into 3D objects... 

A startup called Carbon3D just announced a new process (it’s the March 20th cover article in Science and a Monday TED Talk) that allows for much faster (25-100 X) “printing.”




The new process called Continuous Liquid Interface Production (CLIP) uses a combination of oxygen and laser light to produce complex shapes much more quickly. The end products are apparently much stronger than those produced using layer-by-layer technology. Feature sizes down to 20 microns(!) are possible.

Carbon3D has raised $41M in venture funding (Sequoia Capital is one of their funding sources.)

I'll be playing with a much simpler 3D printing technology over the next few weeks and I'll be blogging about the experience.





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