It’s not every day that a new type of 3D printing technology is invented. Our current modes of 3D printing or as they have been known for decades, “additive manufacturing”, have become cheaper and more widely distributed, but there has been no great advances in the field. Today comes a new entrant, with an entirely new method of production that uses light projected through an oxygen-permeable window to cure a UV sensitive material.
The company, Carbon3D has been in stealth mode for two years and came out today with a TED talk and publication in Science. The video below is sped up 7X, but it still is way faster than any other technique currently in existence.
The call out current 3D printing as really being a series of 2D printing over and over again. It’s a shot across the bow to companies like Makerbot. And Makerbot may have reason to be scared of the technology. They coined the abbreviation CLIP for continuous liquid printing, and it is supposedly 25-100 times faster than traditional printing.
In addition to the speed, because the printer doesn’t use layers, it has a smooth surface, unlike most 3D printed materials.
“Traditional 3D printing requires a number of mechanical steps, repeated over and over again in a layer-by-layer approach. CLIP is a chemical process that carefully balances light and oxygen to eliminate the mechanical steps and the layers.
It works by projecting light through an oxygen-permeable window into a reservoir of UV curable resin. The build platform lifts continuously as the object is grown.”
