How 3D Printing Changed My Life:

The spirit of hacker cool is alive and well at SXSW: Just follow the trail of MakerBots
BY ANDREW LEONARD

3D Printing Rocket Engines

That’s the hope of DIYRockets, a company which advocates the open-source development of space.

3D Printing Vending Machine

By Tyler Falk

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Additive manufacturing or 3D printing is a process of making a three-dimensional solid object of virtually any shape from a digital model. 3D printing is achieved using an additive process, where successive layers of material are laid down in different shapes.^[2] 3D printing is considered distinct from traditional machining techniques, which mostly rely on the removal of material by methods such as cutting or drilling (subtractive processes).

A materials printer usually performs 3D printing processes using digital technology. Since the start of the twenty-first century there has been a large growth in the sales of these machines, and their price has dropped substantially.^[3]

The technology is used in jewelry, footwear, industrial design, architecture, engineering and construction (AEC), automotive, aerospace, dental and medical industries, education, geographic information systems, civil engineering, and many other fields.

3D Printing is poised to change the world we live in.  The everyday effects on our lives will soon be commonplace.  From medical devices, manufacturing, customized clothing/shoes, and household items like stove knobs/and kitchen tools.  When a small plastic piece inside your dishwasher breaks, you log into Whirlpool (or the upcoming Shop4This site) and download the 3D model to your printer.  No traveling to the store, no waiting for the part to arrive in the mail.

We will see companies like Kinkos move to high-end 3D printers that handle multiple types of materials that wouldn’t be feasible for home use.  THe 3D Printing revolution is exciting and about to take off in the next few years.  Get ready and hold on.

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Jack Bolas wearing customized track shoes. Photo courtesy of New Balance.

The cost is still out of reach for real use, but New Balance is also getting into the act of custom fitting 3D shoes (see Nike). You can imagine this is how all footwear may go one day. Walk into a shoe store, have your foot scanned and save the scan to your cell phone. From there any shoes you order online, in person, can be a perfect fit.

According to the press release:

developed a proprietary process for utilizing a runner’s individual biomechanical data to create hyper-customized spike plates designed to improve performance. The process requires race-simulation biomechanical data which the New Balance Sports Research Lab collects using a force plate, in-shoe sensors, and a motion capture system. Advanced algorithms and software are then applied to translate this data into custom 3D printed spike designs.

“But in the future, printing will allow us to be incredibly efficient by making products on-demand and eliminating large chunks of a traditional supply chain,” New Balance’s manager of studio innovations Katherine Petrecca wrote in an e-mailed statement. “As printable materials evolve and printer capacities increase, we will see significant opportunities to expand our usage and the scale of production.”

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The skull implant was just approved by the FDA last month, using a new PEKK polymer that is biomechanically similar to bone.  You can find more info on the approval here.

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Real Challenge
Rapid prototyping has become a standard practice in product development. At the BMW AG plant in Regensburg, Germany, FDM (fused deposition modeling) continues to be an important component in vehicle design prototyping. But moving beyond prototyping, BMW is extending the application of FDM to other areas and functions, including direct digital manufacturing.

The plant’s department of jigs and fixtures uses a Stratasys 3D Production System to build hand-tools for automobile assembly and testing. According to engineer Günter Schmid, “BMW has determined that the FDM process can be an alternative to the conventional metal-cutting manufacturing methods like milling, turning, and boring.” Schmid and fellow engineer, Ulrich Eidenschink, have shown that financial advantages include cost reductions in engineering documentation, warehousing, and manufacturing.

For hand-held devices used on the assembly line, engineers have discovered that there are even greater advantages that arise from the design freedom that FDM offers. Capitalizing on the elimination of constraints, Schmid and Eidenschink employ FDM to make ergonomically designed assembly aids that perform better than conventionally made tools.

To read the full case study with PDF, click here:

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Wired has a cool article about a 3D printed car.  Weighing in at sub 1,200 lbs, the Urbee2 is a three-wheeling lightweight that is nearly as strong as steel.  Oh…and it’s getting ready for production.

To read the full article: Wired

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The completed replica. – ©Andrew Weekes Photography

Loughborough University, with the assistance of Materialise’s Mimics Innovation Suite, brought Richard III back to, well, almost life.

From Materialise’s site:

Scans of the actual remains taken by the Leicester Royal Infirmary were sent to Loughborough, where they were transformed into a 3D computer model using Materialise’s Mimics Innovation Suite.  Laser sintering was then used to create a physical replica of the skeleton.  Laser sintering is a technique that uses a high power laser to fuse small particles of materials, in this case plastic, into a mass that has a three-dimensional shape.

To learn more, click here:

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From Nanoscribe’s Site:  Applications for their printer:

• 3D Photonics:
  Photonic crystals, metamaterials, light directors, circular polarizers, photonic band gap structures, photonic quasicrystals, photonic wire bonds, photonic color
• 3D Scaffolds and Biomimetics:
  Cell migration and stem cell differentiation studies, life sciences, tissue engineering, scaffolds for cells, artificial extracellular matrices (ECM), hierarchical structures, Gecko effect
• 3D Microfluidics:
  Lab-on-a-chip systems, embedding of mixer and filter elements into microfluidic channels, micro-needles for drug delivery, rheology
• 3D Mechanical Microstructures:
  Ultralight materials, mechanical metamaterials, auxetic materials, pentamode structures, tunable Poisson’s ratio, e.g. negative values
• 3D Micro Rapid Prototying:
  The trend towards higher packaging and integration density calls for miniaturized parts. Here, the ability for size miniaturization is displayed.
• 2.5D Micro-Optics:
  Micro-lens arrays of complex shape, aspheric lenses, stacked micro-optics, refractive and diffractive optical elements (DOEs), micro-prisms, phase masks, micro optical devices, integrated optics, optical communication, Fresnel lenses
• 2.5D Free Form Surfaces:
  Free form surfaces for, e.g., data glasses and complex micro-optics, calibration samples, micro-ring resonators
• 2D Photonics:
  Distributed feedback lasers (DFB lasers), diffractive optical elements (DOEs), metamaterials, photonic waveguides and waveguide couplers
• Casting:
  DLW-fabricated three-dimensional structures can be used as templates for casting. Technologies of replication and inversion into metals, semiconductors and oxides have been demonstrated. Molding into PDMS is also shown.

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Outfitting a young South African boy who was born without fingers, utilizes a simple design without electronics to open and close the hand.  By using strings attached to the arm, when the wrist bends, the strings tension and the hand closes.  Simple and elegant, while providing a fantastic solution for a young child.

via: [SharedTutor]

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From the Nokia site in an internview with John Kneeland, Community and Developer Marketing Manager:

John, what exactly is the Lumia 820 3D printing community project and what makes it so special?

 

Nokia’s 3D printing community project is a simple concept with exciting potential. Our Lumia 820 has a removable shell that users can replace with Nokia-made shells in different colors, special ruggedized shells with extra shock and dust protection, and shells that add wireless charging capabilities found in the high-end Lumia 920 to the mid-range 820.

Read more here:

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