3D Printing Magic

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If you’ve visited this blog before you know I’m a great fan of 3D printing. Though some uses, such as printing 3D selfies, seem dubious at best. So, when Carbon3D unveiled its fundamentally different, and better, approach to 3D printing I was intrigued. The company uses an approach called continuous liquid interface production (CLIP), which seems to construct objects from a magical ooze. Check out the video — you’ll be enthralled. The future is here.

Learn more about Carbon3D here.

From Wired:

EVEN IF YOU have little interest in 3-D printing, you’re likely to find  Carbon3D’s Continuous Liquid Interface Production (CLIP) technology fascinating. Rather than the time-intensive printing of a 3-D object layer by layer like most printers, Carbon3D’s technique works 25 to 100 times faster than what you may have seen before, and looks a bit like Terminator 2‘s liquid metal T-1000 in the process.

CLIP creations grow out of a pool of UV-sensitive resin in a process that’s similar to the way laser 3-D printers work, but at a much faster pace. Instead of the laser used in conventional 3-D printers, CLIP uses an ultraviolet projector on the underside of a resin tray to project an image for how each layer should form. Light shines through an oxygen-permeable window onto the resin, which hardens it. Areas of resin that are exposed to oxygen don’t harden, while those that are cut off form the 3-D printed shape.

In practice, all that physics translates to unprecedented 3-D printing speed. At this week’s TED Conference in Vancouver, Carbon3D CEO and co-founder Dr. Joseph DeSimone demonstrated the printer onstage with a bit of theatrical underselling, wagering that his creation could produce in 10 minutes a geometric ball shape that would take a regular 3-D printer up to 10 hours. The CLIP process churned out the design in a little under 7 minutes.

Read the entire story here.

Video courtesy of Carbon3D.