Het grote 3D-printer topic

Ik kom de laatste tijd steeds meer ontwikkelingen tegen op het gebied van 3D-printers en het is een technologie die de wereld zal gaan veranderen! Tijd voor een topic waarin we deze ontwikkeling kunnen bespreken en nieuwtjes met elkaar kunnen delen

We zullen steeds minder fabrieken nodig hebben in de toekomst omdat we een klein fabriekje in huis zullen hebben. Er zijn al 3d printers op de markt voor onder de 1000 dollar.

Stel je voor dat je een onderdeel voor je auto nodig hebt en deze gewoon eventjes thuis uitprint, of wat dacht je van deze gitaar:

There's a spider in my guitar: Olaf Diegel's beautifully detailed 3D printed guitars

[Gizmag] has featured many guitars over the years that have veered well away from slight design variations on the ubiquitous Les Paul or Strat body shapes. There have been those which are just stunning (Di Donato/Stereo Acoustic/Tesla Prodigy), others have a look that's both familiar and strange (Ministar/Jetson/Sonic Wind), and others still that are quite frankly bizarre (gAtari 2600/iTar). I think it's fair to say, though, that none have ever looked quite as extraordinarily beautiful as Olaf Diegel's 3D-printed Scarab and Spider electric guitars.



A Professor of Mechtronics at Massey University's School of Engineering & Advanced Technology in Auckland, New Zealand, Diegel told Gizmag that his wonderfully elaborate designs are in the final stages of prototyping ahead of anticipated June availability. He explained that the models featured in the gallery "have their core made out of solid nylon, or aluminum-filled nylon, but the latest (and I think final) design iteration has a core made out of wood, which allows us to better control the resonance and tone of the guitar, which will allow us to do more customization, not just on how the guitar looks, but also on how it sounds."

The Polyamide 2200 or Alumide body of both the prototypes has been created in one piece using an EOS Formiga P100 selective laser sintering system. The Spider has a number of fearsome-looking ODD arachnids positioned throughout its web-like lattice, while there are numerous flowers and insects hanging from the vines of the Scarab. The body shape is rather reminiscent of a Steinberger P-Series headless guitar, with the size being determined by limitations imposed by the current printer. Diegel told us that there are other designs waiting patiently in the wings for the move to a bigger machine, including the wonderful Les Paul-shaped Atom guitar with electrons that actually spin around the nucleus within the open body.



"What makes the technology so great is that we can print all the insects, and intricate detail, inside the guitar bodies all in one piece together with the body," said Diegel. "No assembly needed!"

The designer described the tone offered by the 3D-printed plastic (or plastic/aluminum) instruments as not being quite as bright as guitars with bodies fashioned from wood but the production models should take care of that. These will feature a CNC-machined wood core body surrounded by the 3D-printed plastic open body shape. It's described as being essentially a sleeve that completely envelops the wooden core so that the wood isn't visible, although there is always room to include a stripped away effect to let the stained or natural wood show through strategically-positioned gaps.

Each production model will be uniquely designed for the customer, with some customization possible for the remainder of non-3D-printed hardware (such as neck, pickups, and bridge) and also the chance to replace the ODD branding on the back of the body with a name or logo.

A new website will go live closer to the launch date, when the guitars will be made available to international buyers. Prices are likely to be in the US$3,000 to US$5,000 range.

http://www.zeitnews.org/a(...)printed-guitars.html

Nog een mooi artikel:

Printing Muscle

Organovo's 3-D printer creates human tissues that could help speed drug discovery.

In a small clean room tucked into the back of San Diego–based startup Organovo, Chirag Khatiwala is building a thin layer of human skeletal muscle. He inserts a cartridge of specially prepared muscle cells into a 3-D printer, which then deposits them in uniform, closely spaced lines in a petri dish. This arrangement allows the cells to grow and interact until they form working muscle tissue that is nearly indistinguishable from something removed from a human subject.



The technology could fill a critical need. Many potential drugs that seem promising when tested in cell cultures or animals fail in clinical trials because cultures and animals are very different from human tissue. Because Organovo's product is so similar to human tissue, it could help researchers identify drugs that will fail long before they reach clinical trials, potentially saving drug companies billions of dollars. So far, Organovo has built tissue of several types, including cardiac muscle, lung, and blood vessels.

Unlike some experimental approaches that have used ink-jet printers to deposit cells, Organovo's technology enables cells to inPrinting Muscleteract with each other much the way they do in the body. They are packed tightly together and incubated, prompting them to adhere to each other and trade chemical signals. When they're printed, the cells are kept bunched together in a paste that helps them grow, migrate, and align themselves properly. ­Muscle cells, for example, orient themselves in the same direction to create tissue that can contract.



So far, Organovo has made only small pieces of tissue, but its ultimate goal is to use its 3-D printer to make complete organs for transplants. Because the organs would be printed from a patient's own cells, there would be less danger of rejection.

Organovo plans to fund its organ-­printing research with revenue from printing tissues to aid in drug development. The company is undertaking experiments to prove that its technology can help researchers detect drug toxicity earlier than is possible with other tests, and it is setting up partnerships with major companies, starting with the drug giant Pfizer.

http://www.zeitnews.org/applied-sciences/printing-muscle.html

En nog eentje voor het slapen gaan:

Smithsonian making 3D models of items from its collection

What do you do when you're the world's largest museum but can display only two percent of the 137 million items in your collection (a mere 2.75 million) at any given time? In an effort to get more of their treasures into the public eye, specialists at the Smithsonian Institution's 19 collective museums and galleries hit upon the solution of digitizing their collection and 3D printing key models and displays suitable for traveling exhibitions. It's a tall order, but one that's sure to give the rapidly blooming business of additive manufacturing a huge boost.



In the past, whenever curators wanted to duplicate an object, they turned to traditional rubber molds and plaster casts. Now, with the Smithsonian's budding digitization initiative coming up to speed, teams can deploy expensive minimally-invasive laser scanners to generate virtual models of items in the collection with micron-level accuracy. Large additive manufacturing companies, such as RedEye on Demand, can then take those files and generate actual physical replicas suitable for display or loan to other museums, or even schools. The savings on insurance premiums alone could go a long way toward defraying the cost of the massive scanning project.

The program's two co-coordinators, Adam Metallo and Vincent Rossi, both with fine art backgSmithsonian making 3D models of items from its collectionrounds, began at the museum as model makers. Eventually they managed to secure a grant for a 3D scanner which they knew could generate far better models when teamed with a quality 3D printer. A recent effort resulted in what the Smithsonian calls the "largest 3D printed museum quality historical replica" in the world - a statue of Thomas Jefferson identical to the one on display at Jefferson's home, Monticello.



"Our mission," Rossi told SPAR, "is to digitize these huge collections in 3D - everything from insects to aircraft. Our day-to-day job is essentially trying to figure out how to actually accomplish that." They'll certainly have their hands full - the museums' collections literally fill acres of storage space in several facilities scattered around the region.

Unfortunately, funding for the project is still scarce, so Metallo and Rossi split their time between digitizing artifacts with laser or CT scanners (or open-source cloud-based digitization software and standard digital cameras) and touting their services to the museum's many researchers, curators and conservators, as well as potential corporate sponsors, hoping to drum up support.Smithsonian making 3D models of items from its collection.



"The one resource we have plenty of is amazing content," Rossi mused, "and along with that comes frustrating problems for us, but they're potentially interesting problems for the industry. How do we take 3D digitization and take it to the Smithsonian scale? We're at the ground floor of trying to understand that."

Indeed, one major issue with archival scans is how to store the digital files so that they'll be accessible decades into the future, when formats will surely have changed. With millions upon millions of items yet to be scanned, it appears we'll just have to wait to see how things shape up on that front.

Rossi and Metallo will report on their Smithsonian work at SPAR International 2012, April 15-18, in Houston.

http://www.zeitnews.org/a(...)-its-collection.html

3D Printing and Printed Electronics Combined in Hybrid "Smart" Wing

So the creation of 3D printed wings with spray on electronics for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) could have potential way beyond the present military applications. The joint development of a model "smart" UAV wing between 3D printer maker, Stratasys (who incidentally provided the 3D printer for the famous Chipotle ad about small farmers) and printed electronics system manufacturer, Optomec, is claimed to be the first time that electronics have been printed on to a complex geometric shape like this.



Besides offering lighter weight embedded components for unmanned, and possibly even manned, aviation—the project could have implications for embedding electronics and solar generating capacity into everything from wind turbines blades to printed housing components.


http://www.zeitnews.org/a(...)id-qsmartq-wing.html

Printable Houses and the Future Opportunity Therein

All the way back in March of 2004, working in his laboratory at the University of Southern California in San Diego, Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis, was working with a new process he had invented called Contour Crafting to construct the world’s first 3D printed wall.

His goal was to use the technology for rapid home construction as a way to rebuild after natural disasters, like the devastating earthquakes that had recently occurred in his home country of Iran.



While we have still not seen our first “printed home” just yet, they will be coming very soon. Perhaps within a year. Commercial buildings will soon follow.

For an industry firmly entrenched in working with nails and screws, the prospects of replacing saws and hammers with giant printing machines seems frightening. But getting beyond this hesitancy lies the biggest construction boom in all history.

Here’s why I think this will happen.

Contour Crafting

Contour Crafting is a form of 3D printing that uses robotic arms and nozzles to squeeze out layers of concrete or other materials, moving back and forth over a set path in order to fabricate a large component. It is a construction technology that has great potential for low-cost, customized buildings that are quicker to make and can therefore reduce energy and emissions.

Using a quick-setting, concrete-like material, contour crafting forms the house’s walls layer by layer until topped off by floors and ceilings that are set into place by the crane. In its current state of thinking, buildings will still require the insertion of structural components, plumbing, wiring, utilities, and even consumer devices like entertainment and audiovisual systems, as the layers are being built.

After using the technology to form simple things like walls and benches, discussions began to focus on other far-reaching opportunities like constructing rapid shelters after natural disasters, building operational structures on the moon out of moon dust, and building cheap houses for people in impoverished countries.

But those early visions were too much for an industry steeped in regulation and tradition, and the laudable ideas of helping the less fortunate will likely give way to a more mainstream approach of working with pieces before building the whole enchilada.


Experimenting with wall-printing technology in 2003

Breaking Through the Barriers

Starting with a mortgage industry that’s becoming increasingly wary of lending on virtually any houses, let alone something that looks radically different, coupled with city planning and zoning departments that have no way of deciding what the code should be on a “non-traditional structure,” and thousands of aging industry experts who can’t imagine building houses in any way other than we do today, we find ourselves up against a slow-moving, massively resistant building culture that will take years to overcome.

That said, this industry will have plenty of opportunity to move forward.

Early on, a number of industries will form around printed components and construction material. Printed blocks, cabinets, wall panels, toilets, and even doors will catch on quickly.

Printed artwork will begin to show up everywhere, including three dimensional “wall printings.”

Imagining what a house-printer could look like

A natural extension of printing new buildings will be devices that recycle the old ones. Ideally, the old material will be ground up and reformulated into new composites that can be re-printed into whatever is needed.

As an example, an old patio deck could be automatically “eaten” by some sort of PacMan device, ground up and mixed with other materials, and used to “print” a new patio deck – all within a couple hours.

By replacing our traditional techniques for pouring concrete, 3d printers could be used to print driveways, sidewalks, benches, fences, foundations, and much more.

When it comes to roofing, small bots will be used to create seamless coatings on the tops of houses. The small army of people needed to reroof a house today will be replaced with a single person who’s job is to place the bot at its initial starting point and make sure there is a consistent supply of material to coat the entire roof.

Only after gaining traction in a myriad of these component industries will we see the public warming up to entire houses being printed from the ground up.

Here are a few examples of this type of 3D printed construction projects already taking place:

The SeatSlug

The SeatSlug is based on the shape of the recently discovered flabellina goddardi sea with the surface inspired by traditional Japanese designs known as karakusamon patterns. Serving both as a piece of artwork and a parkbench, there will be little resistance to this type of niche application.



D-Shape – A printer capable of printing an entire building

An Italian inventor, Enrico Dini, chairman of the company Monolite UK Ltd, has developed a huge three-dimensional printer called D-Shape that can print entire buildings out of sand and an inorganic binder. The printer works by spraying a thin layer of sand followed by a layer of magnesium-based binder from hundreds of nozzles on its underside. The glue turns the sand to solid stone, which is built up layer-by-layer from the bottom up to form anything from a sculpture to a sandstone building.




A team at Loughborough University rethinks the use of concrete with their 3D printer technology.

The Radiolaria

Enrico Dini’s first project was a 24’ tall gazebo-like structure call the Radiolaria, built in 2010.

Experimenting with their ability to craft unusual shapes and forms out of concrete, the Loughborough University team created this unusual piece.


When we rid ourselves of the constraints of flat walls and smooth surfaces, a massive new wave of options begins to appear.

Thinking Three-Dimensionally

If we were able to actually create a three-dimensional holographic display above our computers, like you sometimes see in movies, we wouldn’t even grasp what we could do with that because we have been entrenched into two dimensional thinking from birth, with two-dimensional tools like paper, slide rules and blackboards.

Breaking out of this 2D thinking, the questions then become things like, how do you surf the Internet three dimensionally? How do you build three-dimensional charts and graphs?

We won’t really know how to use that type of display technology until we’ve had an entire generation of kids growing up with it and learning how to use it so that it gets integrated into our thinking and dreaming on a deeper level.



Printing Houses

Our thinking about homes today has been constrained by the materials we work with. Eight-foot sheets of drywall, wooden 2X4s, specific sizes for doors and windows, and an overwhelming desire to keep all surfaces flat, flat, flat.

However, flatness is rarely found in nature. Construction worker hate dealing with curves and unusual shapes because it complicates their lives tremendously. Once we step away from the world of flatness, we begin to see a number of playful options that seem to come straight out of a Dr. Seuss book.

There is no doubt that a non-linear home will have its own unique challenges. Hanging pictures on a wall, installing cabinets, and even arranging furniture will all present obstacles to our present way of thinking.

But the energy and creativity that will flow from these spaces will be nothing short of breathtaking. Walls will no longer need to be flat surfaces. Every wall can be designed with textures, protrusions, and artistic “surface rubble” to put an end to the dreadful uniformity in in our homes today.

What’s Next?

When printing entire buildings, there are many details that are not well understood, and that’s where the great opportunities lie. As an example:

When working with composite material, what is the expansion and contraction rate of this material?

How long will it last?

How resistant is it to wind and rain and even extreme weather like tornadoes, hail, and hurricanes?

Is it possible to instantly switch the printer ingredients from concrete to glass, and automatically “print” windows into their place?

When printing a building with a seamless skin, what are the advantages and disadvantages of this process? Is it possible to “print” the carpeting into a room? And when it wears out, is it possible to bring in bots that “eat” the old carpeting, grind it up, and reprints it with a new formulation and new color?

Once a building is in place, can a printer be used to “print” the cabinets, furniture, toilets, shelving, and decorative details? If part of a structure is damaged, will it be possible to use “repair printers” to produce seamless patches?

Can we use this same technology to “print” our highways?


Non-linear thinking for the buildings in our future

Final Thoughts

Will your next home be a printed home?

Along with this new technology will come a number of labor-reducing and cost-saving features. The number of people needed to build a home will drop by a factor of ten, maybe more.

Over time, we may see old houses torn down with PacMan-like recycling machines, where the material is ground up, reformulated, and an entirely new house is printed in its place – all in less than one day.

All of this sounds pretty radical by today’s standards. But once we see the first homes being built this in this fashion, a new wave of change will quickly descend upon us. And even though many will lose their old jobs, the number of new jobs that get created along the way will more than replace everything we lost.

Personally, I can’t wait.

http://www.zeitnews.org/a(...)rtunity-therein.html

quote:

Op dinsdag 17 april 2012 00:42 schreef Senor__Chang het volgende:
Zo fakking vet is dit he. Weet je misschien ook of je computers enzo uiteindelijk kan printen?

Vanaf 4:45 wordt de quantum printer besproken:


Met dit apparaat kunnen we gaan printen op atomair niveau en kunnen we dus in principe alles bouwen wat we willen. Net zoals de replicator in Star Trek. De wetenschapper in het filmpje dacht 5 jaar geleden dat het nog zo'n 20 jaar zou duren voordat we zo'n printer zullen hebben. Michio Kaku denkt meer aan 50 jaar, maar hij komt er in ieder geval aan!

Will 3-D printing launch a new industrial revolution?

Peter Schmitt, an MIT doctoral student, printed a clock in 2009. He didn't print an image of a clock on a piece of paper. He printed a three-dimensional clock -- an eight-inch diameter plastic timekeeping device with moving gears, hands and counterweights.

When he put it up on a wall and pushed the counterweight, it went ticktock.

"It wasn't very accurate, but it was a functioning clock," Schmitt said.

MIT scientists also would like you to be able to print your own robot. Their vision: Decide what you want it to do, download the design from the Internet, use software to make whatever changes you want and hit "print."

Scientists around the world are working on a technology that could go well beyond robots and clocks and turn the world's economy upside-down. It goes by the name of 3-D printing, and some proclaim that it will trigger a new Industrial Revolution. The Atlantic Council, an industry consulting firm based in Washington, D.C., says the technology is "transformational."

Those working in the field call it "additive manufacturing."



Much of modern manufacturing is by reduction. Manufacturers take blocks of plastic, wood, or metal, and grind and machine away until they get the item they want. All the plastic, wood, or metal that doesn't make it into the item is thrown away, maybe as much as 90 percent wasted.

3-D printing puts down layers of metal powders or plastics as directed by software, just as ink is laid down on paper directed by printer drivers. After each layer is completed, the tray holding the item is lowered a fraction of a millimeter and the next layer is added. Printing continues until the piece is complete.

Molten metal is allowed to cool and harden; plastics or metal powders are hardened by heat or ultraviolet light. The ingredients aren't limited to those substances; almost anything that flows can be accommodated, even chocolate.

There is little waste, and it is possible to change the object by simply working with the software that drives the printer the way text is changed in a word processor.

The end products may be better or possibly more beautiful than current products, the council wrote in a research report. 3-D printing allows designs impossible to make with conventional manufacturing techniques.

The first 3-D printer was invented by the American Charles Hull in 1984. The first machines were huge, slow, very expensive, and had limited use.

In 2004, Adrian Bowyer, a lecturer at Bath University in England, invented a machine that manufactured 50 percent of its own parts and in 2008, the machine printed itself. There was no real profit to be made in a self-replicating machine so Bowyer put the RepRap in the public domain, "open source" in the lexicon. Anyone could buy this desktop printer for under $400 and adapt it at will to print more copies of itself, or other items.



The design keeps improving as people think of better ways to do things, a form of crowd-sourcing, and users share designs online, often for free.

Additive manufacturing, meanwhile, became a huge and growing industry. According to Wohler Associates, a Colorado consulting firm, the industry has sustained an annual growth rate of 26.2 percent for more than 20 years and revenues will reach $3 billion by 2016.

Every year the technique turns out more complex artifacts, faster and cheaper. The technology is now used to print aircraft landing gears, dresses, car parts, individualized tooth crowns, artificial hips and knees, and more.

Scientists are experimenting with human cells to print organs. An Airbus contractor is working on printing an entire aircraft wing using titanium powder. Parts of the fuselage of Boeing's 787 Dreamliner were printed.

Printing a robot is far more complicated than building a clock, but researchers at MIT, the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard think the result will "transform manufacturing and … democratize access to robots," according to MIT's Daniela Rus, leader of the project.

You could identify a need -- say cleaning up the kitchen floor after a kid spilled lunch -- and design a robot specifically for tasks like that. You would download a design from the Internet, adjust to customize it for your kitchen, and print out exactly the robot you designed, moving parts and all.

The researchers already have printed two robots, including one designed to go into contaminated areas and one with a gripper that would help people with disabilities.

The technology introduces serious issues for the world economy.

Most finished products now are the result of many parts manufactured in various places around the world, coming together for assembling into one product. They are then shipped to customers around the world. With 3-D printing, in theory, the entire product would be made at one site, at one time, in one machine, anywhere. Economies of scale would be irrelevant.

"Printing a few thousand iPhones on demand (and with instant updates or different versions for each phone) at a local facility that can manufacture many other products may be far more cost-effective than manufacturing ten million identical iPhones in China and shipping them to 180 countries around the world," the Atlantic Council wrote in a report.

Clearly, not everyone would share the advantages. Manufacturing centers like China could lose millions of jobs in that sector, and their economies could be destabilized. The industries that transport the supply line and distribute the finished product would also be hit, the council wrote. Warehouses full of parts and products could be replaced by machines that print on demand.

The council predicts a renaissance in American manufacturing. But that concept has issues too: most of the machines require no human assistance once the printing starts. You turn it on before you leave the factory and when you come back in the morning, your widget is there.

http://www.zeitnews.org/a(...)rial-revolution.html

Wat leuke voorwerpen geprint met een 3D-printer:


En nog indrukwekkender:

quote:

Op donderdag 19 april 2012 02:49 schreef Golden_Pauper het volgende:
3D printen lijkt me zo vet. Ik wacht nog wat jaartjes totdat dit soort projecten nog goedkoper worden en dan schaf ik me er zeker eentje aan.

[..]

wow zo'n 3d scanner op 1:55 lijkt me ook zeer leuk speelgoed.

Ja echt niet normaal zo'n scanner! Hij scant een object tot een nauwkeurigheid van minder dan een mensenhaar. En hij lijkt ook de bewegende objecten binnenin de sleutel gewoon mee te scannen en te identificeren als losse objecten.

Die sleutel die ze uitprinten is gewoon in een keer geprint, echt vet!

Hier printen ze een hele fiets uit!


Geef mij niet zo'n printer want ik ga de meest belachelijke fiets bedenken en deze uitprinten om vervolgens mee naar m'n werk te fietsen