3D Printing: The Revolution in Personalized Manufacturing
manufacture After many disappointing attempts suddenly late one night he turned the goo into a cup He used software on his computer to draw the cup and he used the laser to harden the resin and to print the cup layer by layer Excitedly he called his wife Antoinette and asked her to drive to the lab to see what he had created She in her pajamas and ready for bed said This had better be good Years later when These decorative pieces are 3D printed through stereolithography This method uses photopolymer resins which harden when exposed to ultraviolet light interviewed about that moment Antoinette said He held this part in his hand and he said I did it The world as we know it will never be the same We laughed and we cried and we stayed up all night just imagining Hull started his own 3D printing company 3D Systems in 1986 He went on to receive the first patent for 3D printing using stereolithography the technology behind his cup He also received several other patents for 3D technologies and developed STL the stereolithography file format that many 3D printers use 10 3D P R IN T IN G
SLA STL AND CAD 3D PRINTING RELIES ON THESE BASIC TECHNOLOGIES STEREOLITHOGRAPHY SLA This was the first 3D printing process and continues to be widely used SLA remains popular because the technique produces a smooth object Other 3D techniques can show individual layers of material often resulting in a bumpy unfinished look In an SLA printer a UV laser is focused on a tub of UV-curable photopolymer resin to produce a layer on the build platform Then the printer lowers the build platform slightly for the next layer and the process is repeated until the object is fully formed This high-quality process comes at a high price for the printer and the resin material Originally organizations used SLA for commercial purposes only Since then companies such as Formlabs 3D Systems and others have provided desktop SLA printers at more affordable prices for individual professionals STEREOLITHOGRAPHY FILE FORMAT STL Chuck Hull developed the STL file format for his SLA files A file format stores specific types of information For example a JPEG file format contains data for displaying an image A pdf contains data for sharing a document across platforms For 3D printing Hull wanted to invent a file format that would allow a 3D printer to read a CAD file He called it STL another abbreviation for stereolithography STL has become the standard 3D printing file format COMPUTER-AIDED DESIGN CAD Engineers and designers in many fields use CAD software to create two or three dimensional 2D or 3D digital representations of physical objects on their computers They can use those designs to determine how best to build the object With 3D printing they can design the object using CAD save the information as an STL file and then print the object from a 3D printer 11
MEET SCOTT CRUMP In the late 1980s Scott Crump knew that engineers at his company needed a way to develop prototypes easily and rapidly to test new product designs He had been thinking about how he could give engineers a way to create a physical object from a CAD file At home in Eden Prairie Minnesota Crump had been experimenting with creating a toy frog for his two-year-old daughter One day he was successful He made a frog with a hot glue gun and a CAD program Crump realized he could automate the process through fused deposition modeling FDM In FDM a 3D printer heats a thermoplastic a plastic that becomes pliable when heated and hard when cooled to a semiliquid state The printer then places the plastic in layers of small beads on a platform along a predetermined path If the printed object has fragile pieces the 3D printer produces a removable support during the printing process When the project is fully printed the support is then removed and the 3D object is ready to use Crump refined FDM in his kitchen ruining most of his family’s pans to melt the plastics When their food started tasting like plastic his wife Lisa asked Scott Crump pictured here with a 3D-printed motorbike cofounded Stratasys with his wife Lisa in suburban Minneapolis Minnesota He came up with the idea for fused deposition modeling in which a printer head places or deposits layers of melted plastic on a movable platform him to move his work to the garage Seeing her husband’s passion and the possibilities for FDM she encouraged him to turn his expensive hobby into a business 12 3D P R IN T IN G
In 1998 Scott and Lisa Crump started the 3D printing company Stratasys They filed several 3D patents including patents for FDM and developed many 3D printers FDM is also known as fused filament fabrication FFF when the process is used by non Stratasys companies It is one of the most popular 3D printing processes for individual users Two decades later Stratasys like 3D Systems sells a range of 3D printers and 3D printing services to many industries So far the Crumps company has more than twenty-four different 3D printers Collectively those 3D printers use more than 120 different materials Stratasys enables companies and individuals to 3D print prototypes concept models molds and actual parts These 3D printers cost from 2,000 to more than 600,000 Stratasys has more than 560 patents pending or granted MEET CARL DECKARD In the summer of 1981 Carl Deckard had just finished his first year of college at the University of Texas at Austin He had started a summer job at TRW Mission a manufacturing shop that made parts for drilling oil Deckard was intrigued that TRW was using CAD then a new software tool He saw an opportunity to create 3D parts for manufacturing using a computer He thought about it for more than two years until he had an idea he thought would work In 1984 in his senior year of college Deckard approached Joe Beaman a mechanical engineering professor with an idea Deckard realized he could use a directed energy beam such as a laser to melt together particles of powder such as metals or plastics Deckard thought it would be possible to make a part from the melted powdered material An added plus he wanted to go to graduate school and he needed a graduate school project Beaman liked the idea and agreed to work with Deckard I N VE N T I N G 3D P R I N T I N G 13
