Category Archives: News
Top 3D Printing News Last Week: Conference Discount, FabCafe, and IBM
A roundup of the top 3D printing news from March 18 to March 24:
IBM Sees Exponential Growth of 3D Printing Industry
More than just a tool, 3D printing is an emerging ecosystem.
– Paul Brody, IBM on the exponential growth of the 3D printing industry
At the Siemens Global Innovation Summit in Phoenix, IBM’s Paul Brody gave a look at how manufacturing transformation is changing the traditional rules of product design and development.
Brody highlighted 3 technologies: 3D printing, intelligent robotics, and open-source engineering.
On 3D printing, he discussed key trends:
- 3D printing is rapidly achieving levels of performance required to be production-ready
- 3D printing is already used in production for medical devices and aerospace
- Performance is improving year on year
- At lower volumes, unit costs are competitive with machining and plastic injection molding
He also dove into trends on open-source and crowdsourcing, asserting that 80% of consumers told IBM they are willing to help enterprises develop their products. Brody claimed, “Accept their help or see them build your competition on Kickstarter.”
IBM had partnered with The Economist to analyze the growth rate of open-source design repositories, namely Thingiverse, and found that the number of 3D printable items is on an exponential upwards path while complexity as measured by number of parts is on a steady increase.
Paul Brody’s full talk is embedded below and more research from IBM is available here.
Defense Distributed Attains License to Create 3D Printed Guns
Look who now has a license to manufacture firearms! The work begins!
– Cody Wilson, Defense Distributed
Controversial 3D printed guns maker Defense Distributed has attained a license to manufacture guns. An image of the Type 7 license was published on Defense Distributed’s Facebook page along with a note that said “The work begins!” This license allows the company to sell the parts they have been manufacturing, such as components for automatic weapons as well as its potential “Wiki Weapon.”
There has been much debate on the topic:
- MakerBot pulled plans for gun parts from Thingiverse following the Newton school shootings
- Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY) is looking to introduce legislation to prohibit 3D printing of gun parts
- Chris Anderson weighs in saying “3D printing is a terrible technology for the working components of a gun.”
Here’s the original launch video for Defense Distributed, now with over 1 million views.
Nanoscribe: Micro 3D Printer May Enable Industrial Breakthrough
Micro 3D printer Nanoscribe is revolutionizing 3D printing on a tiny scale.
Today’s 3D printers can do amazing things, but take a long time to actually create an object – a few hours for an iPhone case and 2,500 hours for a full car. A new desktop 3D printer called Nanoscribe can create complex microstructures incredibly fast – seconds instead of minutes and minutes instead of hours.
Michael Thiel, chief scientific officer at Nanoscribe (a spin-off from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany) recently spoke with MIT Technology Review about his company’s new 3D printing technology and the potential impact on producing medical and electronic devices.
Printing microstructures with features a few hundred nanometers in size could be useful for making heart stents, microneedles for painless shots, gecko adhesives, parts for microfluidics chips, and scaffolds for growing cells and tissue. Another important application could be in the electronics industry, where patterning nanoscale features on chips currently involves slow, expensive techniques. 3D printing would quickly and cheaply yield polymer templates that could be used to make metallic structures.
So far, 3D microprinting has been used only in research laboratories because it’s pretty slow. In fact, many research labs around the world use Nanoscribe’s first-generation printer. The new, faster machine will also find commercial use. Thiel says numerous medical, life sciences, and nanotechnology companies are interested in the new machine. “I’m positive that with the faster throughput we get with this new tool, it might have an industrial breakthrough very soon,” he says.
The technology behind most 3D microprinters is called two-photon polymerization. It involves focusing tiny, ultrashort pulses from a near-infrared laser on a light-sensitive material. The material polymerizes and solidifies at the focused spots. As the laser beam moves in three dimensions, it creates a 3D object.
Today’s printers, including Nanoscribe’s present system, keep the laser beam fixed and move the light-sensitive material along three axes using mechanical stages, which slows down printing. To speed up the process, Nanoscribe’s new tool uses a tiny moving mirror to reflect the laser beam at different angles. Thiel says generating multiple light beams with a microlens array could make the process even faster.
Nanoscribe plans to start selling 3D printers later this year.
Top 3D Printing News Last Week: SXSW, MakieLab, Cube, Kickstarter
A roundup of the top 3D printing news from March 11 to March 17:
Monday, March 11
