Category Archives: News
Unique 3D Printed Art Featured at the 3D Print Show in London
This October, the 3D Print Show will come to London. Among the exhibitors will be artists and designers who are pushing the boundaries of what is possible thanks to 3D printing technology. Here are some of our favorite previews.
Above: fashion takes the front seat during a planned live catwalk show featuring 3D printed wearables. Designer Niccolo Casas created this spicy accessory, part of the “Alchemy” collection.
Sophie Kahn‘s “Dominick” sculpture, featured at the 3D Print Show, derived from using a cinema-quality laser scanner and 3D imaging software to create a unique characterization of a human face in motion.
“The precisely engineered scanning technology I use was never designed to represent the body, which is always in flux,” Kahn notes on her Web site. “Confronted with motion, the software receives conflicting spatial coordinates, and generates a fragmented model. This model is then edited — virtually ‘sculpted’ — using 3D editing software.” Read more about the methods and materials she uses for the 3D printing process.
See a larger set of designs at CNET.
3D Printing Will Be As Disruptive As the PC, Thanks to Piracy
The Economist published a feature on the intellectual property implications of 3D printing. Remember Napster and shareware? 3D printing will be as disruptive as the PC.
The machines, called 3D printers, have existed in industry for years. But at a cost of $100,000 to $1m, few individuals could ever afford one. Fortunately, like everything digital, their price has fallen. So much so, industrial 3D printers can now be had for $15,000, and home versions for little more than $1,000 (or half that in kit form). “In many ways, today’s 3D printing community resembles the personal computing community of the early 1990s,” says Michael Weinberg, a staff lawyer at Public Knowledge, an advocacy group in Washington, DC.
This disruption will require a change in business model. The question is whether manufacturers will adapt.
Manufacturers are likely to behave much like the record industry did when its own business model—based on selling pricey CD albums that few music fans wanted instead of cheap single tracks they craved—came under attack from file-swapping technology and MP3 software. The manufacturers’ most likely recourse will be to embrace copyright, rather than patent, law, because many of their patents will have expired. Patents apply for only 20 years while copyright continues for 70 years after the creator’s death.
Will regulation create obstacles to innovation?
Today’s 3D printing crowd—tucked away in garages, basements, small workshops and university labs—needs to keep a keen eye on such policy debates as they grow. “There will be a time when impacted legacy industries [will] demand some sort of DMCA for 3D printing,” says Mr Weinberg. If the tinkerers wait until that day, it will be too late.
Read the full feature at The Economist.
Piracy photo by robotson used under Creative Commons license.
Top 3D Printing Headlines Last Week: Katy Perry, Madonna, Airplanes, Military
A roundup of the top news On 3D Printing brought you from September 3 to September 9.
Monday, September 3
Thursday, September 6
Saturday, September 8
3D Printing Mobile Labs: A New Combat Strategy for the U.S. Military
The U.S. military is embracing 3D printing in a novel way: they have developed mobile labs that can prototype and manufacture replacement parts or innovative equipment in combat.
The service’s Rapid Equipping Force, known as the REF, took a standard 20-foot shipping container and packed it with high-tech, prototyping machines, lab gear and manufacturing tools to create the Expeditionary Lab — Mobile.
Soldiers no longer have to wait to bring ideas back to scientists and engineers back in the states. The REF has brought the experts to the soldiers in combat.
The first mobile 3D printing labs were deployed to Afghanistan this summer. Each lab costs $2.8 million.
Col. Pete Newell, commander of the Army’s REF, explained the motivation. “The soldiers out there, they know how to do stuff; they know how to fix stuff and they know what they need to be able to do, but what they don’t have is the technical expertise in many cases to do it themselves.”
The extreme heat in Afghanistan quickly eroded the eight-hour battery life of these devices down to 45 minutes, a problem that loaded down dismounted soldiers with the weight of extra batteries for multi-day missions.
Engineers created a special adaptor and power cable for a standard military-issue BA5590 battery, which now powers the Minehound for up to nine hours. The fix also allowed soldiers to take the battery off the device and wear it on their body for better weight distribution and reduced arm fatigue, Newell said.
Expect to see a growth in 3D printing mobile labs – not just for combat scenarios but also for handling natural disasters and other peace-time missions.
Watch the video below for more details.
Via Military.com.
3D Printing a Futuristic Airplane Cabin: Innovation at Airbus
Could you 3D print an airplane? Some engineers at Airbus seem to think so, at least by 2050 and with a really big 3D printer.
Bastian Schaefer, a cabin engineer with Airbus, has been working for the last two years on a concept cabin that envisions what the future of flight would look like from the passenger’s perspective. From that came a radical concept: build the aircraft itself from the ground up with a 3D printer that’s very large in deed, ie. as big as an aircraft hangar. That probably sounds like a long shot, since the biggest 3D printers today are about the size of a dining table. But the Airbus design comes with a roadmap, from 3D-printing small components now, through to the plane as a whole around 2050.
Why use 3D printing at all? Airbus parent EADS has been looking into using the process, known as additive layer manufacturing, for making aircraft for some time because it’s potentially cheaper, and can result in components that are 65% ligher than with traditional manufacturing methods. Airbus’ concept plane is also so dizzyingly complicated that it requires radical manufacturing methods: from the curved fuselage to the bionic structure, to the transparent skin that gives passengers a panoramic view of the sky and clouds around them.
The challenges are many. First, you need a 3D printer big enough to print airplane parts. Second, you need to incorporate precise, lightweight materials into the additive manufacturing construction. And third, this novel design needs to pass stringent regulation in the aviation industry.
Again the engineers are on the case.
EADS has been experimenting with 3D printing and famously printed an “Airbike” last year. Schaefer, who has been with Airbus for six years, started working on the transparent concept cabin project around the same time as the Airbike project in 2010, calling on colleagues from different departments at Airbus. “We have an opportunity to do something different,” he told them.
He and other industrial designers, tech- and trend-scouts started brainstorming and came up with the current, 3D printed concept design. He has around 10 people working on the project with him, including industrial designers and tech scouts, all trying to push the technology forward.
Below is a video showcasing the Airbus concept cabin, which incorporates many of these new design ideas.
Via Forbes.
Airplane cabin photo by WexDub used under Creative Commons license.
