You can now print an Eiffel Tower in 15 minutes

Engineers at NewPro3D of Vancouver, Canada felt frustrated with the time it took to print parts for their projects. To keep up with demand and the increased speed of the industry, they wanted and needed a faster iteration cycle. It’s then that the team decided to focus on how it could improve the 3D printing process. As the NewPro3D team put more resources into solving this problem, the company became a manufacturer of its own 3D printers, and effectively served as the company’s first customers.

The company claims that these efforts resulted in creating the fastest 3D printer to date. Their 3D printing process is set to change 3D printing standards forever by cutting down printing times of an object from hours to just a few minutes. The focus has been on eliminating the dead time involved in the manufacturing process: layering and peeling. Their method is called continuous printing.

On the surface, continuous printing resembles that seen in a conventional bottom-up 3D printing system. Typical FDM 3D printers can produce a similar-sized tower in about 11 hours. ILI™, Intelligent Liquid Interface, integrates a transparent wet table membrane between the photo-curing resin and the light source. The membrane is chemically designed to create a dead zone and inhibit the polymerization between the membrane and the printed object. This shift eliminates the mechanical processes used in conventional 3D printing techniques, allowing the maker to grow and compile an object continuously at record speeds.

“We print at very high speeds, and we do not have the printing size limitations of our competitors. We do not require additional gases or extra equipment to print continuously. We have a very practical, simple approach,” says Gabriel Castanon, a representative of the company.

On this year’s CES 2016 exhibit floor visitors to the NewPro3D booth watched as the notoriously complicated Eiffel Tower model printed flawlessly in 15 minutes. The demonstration at CES generated buzz amongst 3D printing enthusiasts as the display “pulled” the tower out of a vat of resin in a short period.

To accommodate to fast-evolving necessities in a creative world, NewPro3D developed a special algorithm to work with ILI™ that optimizes the printing settings of its 3D-printed units to achieve the fastest speeds with superb detail and quality. NewPro3D is also developing two other 3D printers, one large enough to manufacture a 25-foot turbine blade in only 16 hours, and another that works with a never-before-seen process that the company says could completely shatter existing metal 3D printing speeds.

NewPro3D

Originally published at www.psfk.com on January 28, 2016.