Additive manufacturing–or 3D printing–uses digital manufacturing processes to fabricate components that are light, strong, and require no special tooling to produce. Over the past decade, the field has experienced staggering growth, at a rate of more than 20% per year, printing pieces that range from aircraft components and car parts to medical and dental implants […]
3d printing
A Look At 4D Printing: The Next Big Thing?
While the fourth industrial revolution promises automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies, it leaves behind a prudent technology. Along with the cyber-physical systems, Industry 4.0 still clings on to a technology that was devised back in the early 1990s – 3D Printing. Even though 3D Printing remains one of the best manufacturing practices, researchers […]
(Video) Expandable Foam For 3D Printing Large Objects
It’s a frustrating limitation of 3D printing: Printed objects must be smaller than the machine making them. Huge machines are impractical for printing large parts because they take up too much space and require excessive time to print. Now, a new material reported in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces can be used to 3D print […]
High Color Purity 3D Printing
Selective powder sintering for 3D printing has recently become an increasingly affordable solution for manufacturing made-to-order elements of almost any shape or geometry. This technique involves heating a bed of powder (such as polyamide, PA12) to just below its melting point, using an IR light source to selectively melt a cross section of the powder, […]
New Technology Revolutionizes 3D Metal Printing
Selective LED-based melting (SLEDM) – i.e. the targeted melting of metal powder using high-power LED light sources – is the name of the new technology that a team led by Franz Haas, head of the Institute of Production Engineering at TU Graz, has developed for 3D metal printing and has now applied for a patent. […]
A Great New Way To Paint 3D-printed Objects
Rutgers engineers have created a highly effective way to paint complex 3D-printed objects, such as lightweight frames for aircraft and biomedical stents, that could save manufacturers time and money and provide new opportunities to create “smart skins” for printed parts. The findings are published in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces. Conventional sprays and […]