3D Printing: The Revolution in Personalized Manufacturing
3D printing can change not only where people live but how they live For example high school students in Van Buren Ohio used a 3D printer to create a prosthetic hand for a toddler in their town The students gathered thirty dollars worth of plastic melted it into liquid form and put it into the school’s 3D printer They used 3D computer-aided design CAD software to design the hand Thomas Wolford a senior at Van Buren High School described the printing process The nozzle goes around it all in crazy funky patterns and prints it out layer by layer he said Another senior Aaron Scasny added We ran fishing wire down through the bottom of the hand and this elastic threaded cord through the top so when you bend it it acts like tendons in your hand Because young children outgrow their prosthetics outfitting them with artificial limbs was expensive in the past But 3D printing has made it Teens in Ohio 3D printed a prosthetic hand for Addy Johnson at their school The technologies involved in 3D printing are available to all and are often used to improve everyday life for individuals possible for more children and adults to have the prosthetics they need because they can afford it BIOPRINTERS In the medical field 3D printing is a modern superpower With bioprinters bioprinting researchers from all over the world have successfully re-created human ears noses skull bones tracheas bladders and other body parts The ink-jet printing of viable cells is one example of what a 3D printer can do It deposits drops of 6 3D P R IN T IN G
This 3D printer can quickly produce human tissues The bioprint head moves back and forth and up and down placing human cells on the platform The bioprinter alternates layers of bioink a dissolvable gel with the cells to protect them during printing It also places growth factor a protein or a hormone in the solution to help cells grow The final tissue takes several hours to print human cellular material and proteins onto a platform in the same way an ink-jet printer drops ink onto a piece of paper Traditional printers place one layer of ink onto one sheet of paper at a time By contrast a 3D ink-jet printer adjusts its platform up and down adding cellular material layer by layer until a 3D organ emerges In the future 3D medical printouts could be lifesaving for people who need organ transplants or repairs due to injuries or illness However Robert Langer a professor of chemical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT cautions about the current limitations of 3D bioprinting Right now we can’t make any organ or tissue to function properly in humans other than skin 3D printing hasn’t even been used successfully for that Making an organ also requires blood vessels nerves and cells to behave properly 3D printing can’t do that Bioprinting researchers worldwide continue their laboratory work researching designing and 3D printing to find lifesaving solutions Wasps have had millions of years to evolve their 3D printing process For humans 3D printing technologies are a revolution WASPSDOIT 7
CHAPTER INVENTING 3D PRINTING Innovative ideas often occur to more than one person at the same time And it usually takes more than one person’s efforts to make an innovative idea a reality 3D printing got its start with Chuck Hull Scott Crump and Carl Deckard These engineers did not know one another when they each invented 3D printing but they had a lot in common They each worked in manufacturing They each saw that traditional manufacturing needed a new and faster approach to developing prototypes Prototypes are demonstration objects that resemble the final product to help developers refine a product before they build it Engineers and designers use prototyping to create a mockup of a part to see how well it will work CAD software helps engineers and designers make prototypes so they can test their designs At some point in the process designers must make and test the actual physical prototype Often building and testing a design happens many times before the designed product actually works Using traditional manufacturing approaches of building welding and assembling a prototype is costly and time consuming Hull Crump and Deckard saw the need to speed up prototyping They knew that rapid prototyping would reduce
the time and cost of developing a new product These quickly made prototypes would have enough of the features of the final product to help designers and engineers make changes to the design so they could build the best product possible Independently of one another the three men successfully developed 3D printing processes that are still in use MEET CHUCK HULL In 1983 Charles Chuck Hull had been experimenting for months with a technique called stereolithography SLA This printing method requires a computer an ultraviolet UV laser and a liquid goo called photopolymer resin The resin naturally hardens when it comes in contact with the heat of the laser’s light Hull was working for a company in San Gabriel California developing durable resin coatings for tabletops His experiments with the resin gave him the idea that he could turn his digital designs into physical objects using those same resins His company agreed to give him a small lab to see what he could make Hull imagined that he could create a process for engineers to quickly make prototypes for the objects they wanted to To be successful an invention has to be more than a good idea It has to be designed well and work well So before making a product a company will first develop a prototype above or model to make sure the idea will work as planned look good and be cost-effective to manufacture This can be a lengthy expensive process however 3D printing can speed it up significantly and save companies money too I N VE N T I N G 3D P R I N T I N G 9
