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by Kliment
5607 days ago
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Well, that's not entirely true. The lattice structures are internal to the object, and substitute for solid infill. Commercial FDM 3d printers use a crosshatch instead of solid fill, and the reprap toolchain has that as well as a number of cool ones like hexagonal infill. So you have lattices instead of solid walls in the microstructure. With powder printers, such as the metal printers described in the article, you can form hollow areas of any shape since the raw material itself acts as support. To get the material out they need to be open on one side, but that is hardly an issue with a design that airy. No additional material is needed. The only case where you need support is for FDM based printing with sharp overhangs. Even this can be mitigated with clever design, such as making overhanging parts with bridges (connecting walls with a stretched layer of material that spans a gap) or teardrops (closing gaps using low overhang structures, like the buttresses on gothic buildings). The main advantage of 3d printing is that it can produce structures internal to the object that cannot be made by any subtractive method, and that it makes production costs linear and design-independent. This is very cool, since it literally costs the same to make two identical or two different objects (with the same build time) and it separates cost from volume. The costs per unit are still high compared to injection or casting, but the tooling costs are essentially zero. And the costs per unit are dropping rapidly, particularly given that the FDM printers themselves are now partially self-replicating It's a very exciting time to be living in. I have three printers. The first printed the second. The second printed the third. I've made a number of things which turned from idea to design to prototype within hours to days. Then I tweak, hit print again and I've got production. No tooling, no waiting. |
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Many lattice structures can still be made using injection molding equipment (far cheaper) or starting with a raw material with such a structure: think of aluminum honeycomb.
I agree 3DP is exciting, but we need to get real about what we're trying to achieve - traditional manufacturing engineers are pretty clever too. Not every STL should be run through a nozzle...
FDM is actually one of the worst methods for 3DP manufacturing because it scales linearly - MakerBot et al use this tech because it's the easiest process to build and makes durable parts from common raw materials.