What Is 3D Printing Technology How 3D Printing Works 3D Printing Technology Explains How to Use 3D Printers 3D Printing Materials How Much 3D Printing Costs Introduction to 3D Printing The 3D printing process was developed in the 1980s and was originally known as rapid prototyping.
Process and material development and improvement, from 3D printing to prototyping, have resulted in updates to applications downstream of the product development process chain. The first 3D printing production equipment was developed by Hideo Kodama of Nagoya City Industrial Research Institute, when he invented two additive manufacturing methods for 3D models.
What Is 3D Printing Technology
Unlike traditional methods of making the final shape by carving, grinding or stamping raw materials, 3D printing is an additive manufacturing method that works by creating successive layers of raw materials such as metals, plastics, etc. and ceramics.
Objects are created from digital files, which are Rendering of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) images or CAD (Computer Aided Design) drawings, allowing manufacturers to easily make changes or customize the product as they see fit. Terms for 3D printing may vary.
Regarding how layers are applied and Type of material used. 2 There are many 3D printers available on the market, ranging from affordable consumer models that can print small and simple parts to commercial grade 3D printers that produce very large and complex products.
Since this type of manufacturing does not depend on Molds or multiple pieces of specialized equipment, and designs can be changed quickly, so 3D printing can also be used to create patient-friendly products based on the patient’s anatomy.
Some industries, such as hearing aid manufacturers, airlines, and automakers, use 3D printing to make prototypes and use custom scans to mass-produce their products. The technology is also being developed for 3D printing of skin, bone, tissue, drugs and even human organs.
In addition to prototyping to support the development of new products in the medical and dental industries, the technology is used to create metal casting models behind crowns, as well as to produce tools for vacuum forming plastics into dentures and aligners.
With this technology, objects can be built from high-quality thermoplastic materials1. Stereolithography uses liquid plastic as a starting material, and this liquid plastic is transformed layer by layer into a three-dimensional object1.
As we’ve seen before, the 3D printing process involves building up layers of molten plastic to create objects. In 3D printing, you design an object using software, and the 3D printer creates the object by adding material layer after layer to form the object’s shape.
The product can be made using a variety of print media, including plastic, powder, filament and paper. Simply put, 3D printers use computer-aided design (CAD) to create 3D objects from various materials, such as molten plastic or powder.
As mentioned above, 3D printers are very flexible. Not only in the materials they use, but in the things they can print. On the other hand, they also have several disadvantages; these include low productivity, lower surface accuracy and finish than machined parts, a relatively limited range of machinable materials, and tighter dimensions of parts that can be produced in a cost-effective and non-deformable manner limit.
For this reason, the main market for 3D printing is the so-called rapid prototyping, that is, the rapid production of parts that will eventually be mass-produced in traditional manufacturing processes.
As 3D printers have become more reliable and able to print on a wider range of materials, from durable glass or metal composites to flexible rubber-like materials, short-term, small-batch production has become a viable option.
Training methods are designed to reduce the marginal costs of making individual parts, but creating unique molds or machines used in the manufacturing process means that setup costs are very, very high.
For example, unlike traditional manufacturing where parts are cut from larger blocks of material, additive manufacturing builds the product layer by layer and prints only the relevant parts, using less material and therefore less energy to produce raw materials. Additive manufacturing is the opposite of subtractive processes, which remove (or subtract) material from larger blocks to create the final object, such as CNC machining.
All 3D printing processes are so-called additive manufacturing or additive manufacturing, in which objects are built sequentially instead of being melted or modeled in one step (the merge process) or cut and machined from a solid block ( subtraction process). ).
3D fusion printing techniques include powder bed fusion, electron beam fusion, and direct energy deposition. They use lasers, arcs or electron beams to print objects by fusing materials together.
In this process, the material is applied in drops through a small diameter nozzle, similar to how a conventional inkjet printer works, but layer by layer is applied to the printing platform and then cured by UV radiation. A jet of bonding material applies a thin layer of feed material such as metal, polymer sand or ceramic to the build platform, after which the print head applies drops of adhesive to bind the particles together.
Inkjet printing works the same as inkjet printing, except that instead of spreading ink across the page, the process deposits layers of liquid material from one or more printheads. The layers are then cured before the process starts all over again for the next layer.
This type of technology requires additional vertical support structures. d) to support projecting parts. Schematic representation of the 3D printing method known as fused filament fabrication; The plastic filament is fed through a heated moving die that melts and extrudes it, layer by layer into the desired shape.
This process is analogous to the melting of ink or toner on paper in a printer (hence the term “printing”), but is actually the solidification or binding of a liquid or powder at each point in a horizontal cross section where a solid material is required.
In an additive process, an object is created by applying successive layers of material until the object is created. The creation of a 3D printed object is achieved through additive processes. Subtractive manufacturing, such as milling and turning, creates objects by removing (machining) material from a block of solid material, also often referred to as a stock. Almost any material can be processed in some way, which makes this technique widely used.
Because 3D printing can create complex and complex shapes using less material than subtractive manufacturing processes such as milling, it is used in hydroforming, molding, injection molding, and other processes.
Key Points Three-dimensional (3D) printing is an additive manufacturing process in which physical objects are created from digital designs by printing thin layers of materials and then fusing them. Direct means creating the object directly from the 3D design, while indirect manufacturing means that the 3D printed object (model) is ultimately used to create the investment casting mold.