3D printing has the potential to revolutionise product design and manufacturing in a vast range of fields from custom components for consumer products, to 3D printed dental products and bone and medical implants that could save lives. However, the process also creates a large amount of expensive and unsustainable waste and takes a long time, making it difficult for 3D printing to be implemented on a wide scale.
Researchers in USC Viterbi’s Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering have created a low cost reusable support method to reduce the need for 3D printers to print these wasteful supports, vastly improving cost effectiveness and sustainability for 3D printing.
The work, led by Yong Chen, Professor, Industrial and Systems Engineering and PhD student Yang Xu, has been published in Additive Manufacturing.
Traditional 3D printing using the Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) technique, prints layer by layer, directly onto a static metal surface. The new prototype instead uses a programmable, dynamically controlled surface made of moveable metal pins to replace the printed supports. The pins rise up as the printer progressively builds the product. Chen said that testing of the new prototype has shown it saves around 35 per cent in materials used to print objects.
“I work with biomedical doctors who 3D print using biomaterials to build tissue or organs. A lot of the materials they use are very expensive, we are talking about small bottles that cost between US$ 500 to US$ 1000 each,” Chen said.
“For standard FDM printers, the materials cost is something like US$ 50 per kilogram, but for bioprinting, it’s more like US$ 50 per gram. So if we can save 30 per cent on material that would have gone into printing these supports, that is a huge cost saving for 3D printing for biomedical purposes,” added Chen.
Chen said that similar prototypes developed in the past relied on individual motors to raise each of the mechanical supports, resulting in highly energy intensive products that were also much more expensive to purchase, and thus not cost effective for 3D printers.
The research team’s new prototype works by running each of its individual supports from a single motor that moves a platform. The platform raises groups of metal pins at the same time, making it a cost effective solution. Based on the product design, the program’s software would tell the user where they need to add a series of metal tubes into the base of the platform.
The position of these tubes would then determine which pins would raise to defined heights to best support the 3D printed product, while also creating the least amount of wastage from printed supports. At the end of the process, the pins can be easily removed without damaging the product.