3D Objects Rise From Resin Pool With New 3D Printing Technology
Posted on March 17, 2015
A company named Carbon3D has unveiled a new faster 3D printing technology. The 3D objects rise fully formed from a pool of resin using what the company calls CLIP (Continuous Liquid Interface Production). The company says its objects grow parts instead of being printed layer by layer.
The method was invented by researchers from UNC-Chapel Hill. The Washington Post reports that the creators of the technology were inspired by the scene in Terminator 2: Judgment Day where the liquid metal T-1000 rises from a puddle of metallic goo. Carbon3D says its CLIP technology is 25 to 100 times faster than current 3D printers.
CLIP works by manipulating light and oxygen to fuse objects together in a liquid medium. Beams of light are projected through an oxygen-permeable window into a liquid resin. Carbon3D says it can create objects that have feature sizes below 20 microns, which is less than one-quarter the width of a piece of paper.
The company says, "CLIP creates a 'dead zone' in the resin pool just tens of microns thick (about 2-3 diameters of a red blood cell) where photopolymerization cannot occur. As a series of cross-sectional images of a 3D model is played like a movie into the resin pool from underneath, the physical object emerges continuously from just above the dead zone."
Here is a video of the technology in action:
A research paper on the new 3D object printing technology can be found here in the journal, Science.
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