(rock music) - there we are. hot off the press. ^literally. - not that hot.
3d printing for mass production, i expected it to be hotter to the touch. - it's small, so it's gonna cool quickly. - we can actually see how hot that is. - [woman] it didn't get hot.
- it does still feel a little bit warm. - [woman] not as hot as i thought it would be. - the build plate is 100 degrees c and the extruders are about 212 celsius, that's the melting point of the plastic. we'll go ahead and get started. so welcome everybody to this tech bytes presentation on 3d printing. my name is corrie bergeron, i think you guys know me.
we got this 3d printer a few years ago as part of a grant. and explicitly it came with the instructions to play with it. those were the directions in the grant, to play with it. so we've been doing that. i make no claims to any expertise in 3d printing. it's just that i've had it to play with for a couple years, i've figured a few things out. what we're gonna talk about is a little bit
of the history of the technology, the different kinds of printers there are, and the uses to which they're being put and to which they may yet be put in the future. this is a technology that is very much on the rise, on the increase, although it's not particularly new. 3d printing really goes back to the mid-80s, when the first patents were created. computers got small enough and powerful enough
to control machines and do so in a fairly sophisticated way. the first stereolithography process was patented in 1986. stereolithography is a way of using a laser that's steered by a computer to solidify a liquid polymer resin. and do it a layer at a time, and a layer at a time, and a layer at a time. i guess it might help to distinguish 3d printing, or additive manufacturing, from traditional manufacturing,
or subtractive manufacturing. traditional manufacturing is kind of like sculpting ^in wood or metal or stone, where you start with a block ^of stuff and then hack away the bits you don't want to leave you with the finished shape. 3d printing is more like sculpting with clay, except instead of sticking random blobs on and kind of smoothing them out and all that, you do it like you did in kindergarten,
where you roll out a snake of clay and you make a circle, you roll out another snake and you put that on the next layer, the next layer, the next layer, until you've got the candy dish or the ash tray, as it was in my day. 3d printing is the same thing, where you build up an object layer by layer by layer. and if you take a look at the things that are scattered around on the table, you look closely at them,
you can see the layers. this particular kind of printer doesn't do overhanging stuff very well. if you take a look at the minion, you can see that his eyes are a little droopy because there's no support built up underneath it. if we take a look at this, you can see that the globe here, because it has some overhanging stuff, it had to have some lattice work built in.
and the computer figures that out and calculates how to do that automatically. after you finish building it, you'll pull that support material away. they also have a kind of plastic that's water soluble, that if you have a two extruder machine like this one, you can have one of the extruders build the lattice work out of water soluble material that you then just rinse away after the piece is done.
that's kind of a cool thing. - [man] when you're gonna print something and you know you're going to have overhang, maybe it helps to print it upside down. in other words, you have the 3d thing, is there a way of optimizing that so you have the least overhang possible? - yeah, so here's a fishing lure that i just downloaded off of thingiverse.com.
and here in the replicator g software, which is the free software that turns a 3d object into a printable model, you can rotate this thing. originally it came out downloaded like that. no, not like that. on its side. i could see that was gonna be a problem, so i just rotated it to put the flat side down. and that'll print a whole lot better
than having all this build stuff. - [man] this is you doing it as opposed to plotting it. - right, right. it's me making the decision on how i want to do it. so in the late 80s, early 90s, there were a number of different technologies designed and patented. those patents began to expire around the turn of the century. so hobbyists and tinkerers got a hold of the technology
and started playing around with it. around 2004, the idea of a reprap, a self replicating machine, took hold in the open source community. and the whole idea was to design an open source machine that could make a copy of itself. ^that was the goal. ^it hasn't quite turned out that way, ^but they've gotten fairly close.
and the plans for the makerbot were available freely on the internet, and all the parts are off the shelf. then makerbot got kind of full of itself, and the company had a lot of internal drama, and a lot of the original founders left the company with a good deal of animosity and acrimony. and the company took some of its technology private, made it proprietary, and that caused an absolute uproar in the industry.
the industry, the community was outraged, absolutely outraged. which is kind of funny, because when apple, which is a notoriously closed company, in fact, my son has a t-shirt that says i visited the apple campus, but that's all i'm allowed to tell you. they released about 5% of their source code and everybody went, "oh, wonderful.
"apple's going open." makerbot took about 5% of their source code private, everyone went "oh, hate hate hate." so it's kind of weird. makerbot got bought out by stratasys, who's one of the originators, one of the first patents was filed by stratasys back in the mid-80s. so it's kind of ironic that they absorbed makerbot and makerbot is now a brand.
it's kind of their low end. stratasys for decades has made very high end, very expensive, very large, very capable machines. we're talking, $30, $50,000 a pop. as opposed to, i think that was $2,500 when we bought it. and now around $100, you can get an entry level machine at home depot. so the technology has really become more accessible. within the last five years or so,
there's been a lot of growth, a lot of consolidation. so the kinds of the 3d printers, the kinds of technology, there are three basic kinds, although there's lots and lots of options in there. this is called an fdm, or fused deposition modeling. it squeezes out melted plastic like toothpaste out of a tube and builds it up, layer by layer by layer. and there's all kinds of different materials you can feed into that thing.
we'll talk about that in a minute. then there's laser sintering, where you have a powder, typically of metal, although you can also have nylon, and it's fused by a laser, essentially welding the particles together. what's neat about that is you can change the metal partway through the build. so you can build, say, a turbine blade for a jet engine that's stainless steel at the hub,
where you need a lot of tensile strength, and then it transitions to titanium, which has high heat resistance. that's really, really neat. trying to manufacture that by any other means would be just ridiculously expensive. but because it's a computer file, you can replicate it over and over and over again, just set the machines up and they go.
you just have to keep them fed and supplied with material. there's another kind of sintering that uses a plastic material, where essentially an inkjet moves across an x and a y and prints a solvent to fuse the plastic particles together. that's kind of neat. the third kind is what we talked about before, the stereolithography, where you have a laser beam that catalyzes a liquid resin and solidifies it.
and you can get some very high resolution prints in that regard. yeah? - [man] when you do the metal you talked about, you want to go from steel to titanium. will it morph or will there be a line? this is steel, this is titanium, or are you going to start doing alloy in between? ^- depends on how you want to design it.
^that's an engineering question. ^depends on how you set it up. i'm not exactly certain, to tell you the truth. there's all kinds of different kinds of extruded materials for the fdm kind of machine. this machine uses styrene plastic, which is the same stuff they make legos out of, and model airplane parts and things like that. there's also a resin called pla, which is biodegradable,
it's essentially modified corn. there are metallic plastics, where you've got metallic powder that's embedded into the plastic matrix, and the resulting part you can actually treat like metal. you can polish it, you can cut it, you can shape it. it will tarnish. you print the copper and it will get that nice green verdigris. which is really kind of neat.
they even have wood, with wood fibers embedded in it, and you can treat that like a wooden object, even though it's got this fantastic shape that you could not carve out of wood, but you can sand it and polish it and varnish it and do anything you would with wood. there's flexible materials, so you could print a running shoe. custom print your own running shoe.
water soluble we talked about. concrete, there's a fellow in minnesota who built a very large 3d printer and printed a castle for his kids to play in in his backyard, out of concrete. and there's a hotel i think in guatemala, guam maybe, there's a hotel that was 3d printed in concrete. you can sort of print food. i've seen it done. a guy developed a machine that would print a pizza.
what the point of that is, i think was just to be able to say that you could 3d print a pizza. but pretty much anything you can squirt out of a nozzle, you can print. we're even printing tissue. they're printing autograft skin for burn victims. so say you've got a significant burn, they'll take tissue, they'll take your skin, grow it in a lab, and then print a new sheet of skin
so there's no chance of rejection. at carnegie mellon, a team has said that they figured out how to print a capillary network, which means we're that close to being able to 3d print tissue and organs. imagine if you could get to the point where you could print a kidney and take somebody off the transplant waiting list. that's where they're starting at, is kidneys, because kidneys are fantastically, crazy complex.
if you can print a kidney, you can print anything else, short of brain tissue, probably. electronic circuits can be printed. all kinds of things with that kind of machine, that extrudes one layer at a time. so this is what a resin printer looks like. the reason for the orange plastic is because it's an ultraviolet laser. so the orange would absorb the uv
and protect your eyes from any stray laser radiation. there you have a tray of liquid resin, and it's transparent. the laser beam shoots up from underneath it and then the build happens upside down. so it moves in a positive z direction and builds it one layer at a time, because the laser beam is focused at the surface, and it's the presence of oxygen that helps to catalyze the resin and solidify it.
this is the sintering. so what this does, you can see that you have the powder and the laser beam welds the things together, and then you push another layer across. so the build itself drops down. once it's done, it will emerge like the lady of the lake in excalibur. here's that concrete printer. you can see it's the same idea,
just a slightly larger scale. there, the challenge of course is to keep it supplied. so what's the process? first you create a 3d model. you can use autodesk or sketchup or tinkercad or any of a number of software packages that creates a standard software file, a standard 3d file. you could download it.
there's a whole bunch of places online where you can download things that people have uploaded for free. and then you convert the model to gcode, because the 3d model is a set of xyz points, and what you need to do is translate that into a tool path, into a path for each layer. there is a tool called skein forge that does that and does that automatically.
it figures it out and then you build the gcode. gcode is an industry standard cnc control language. it has additional commands added for additive printing. so commands to turn on the extruder, to heat up the build platform, things like that. ^whereas your standard gcode would have things like ^how fast is your feed rate for your tool head, ^what's your rpm, and things like that. and then you convert the gcode to a printer specific code.
for this machine, it's called an s3g file. and then you send the code to the printer. so the software looks like this. you convert it to gcode. i'm gonna save the model. come on. so here it lets me set a bunch of different parameters. i can set how much infill there is.
if you look at some of the models that are partially complete, you can see kind of a honeycomb pattern on the inside. so it takes up less plastic, it builds faster. what the feed rate is, whether i'm gonna use the left or the right, if i'm gonna put a platform underneath it, if i'm gonna use support, and the machine figures all that out. then it'll send it to the printer.
i can either save that on an sd card, which is what that's printing off now, or i can actually hook it up via usb. then you just print it. even something simple takes a while. this little atom, i think the name of the file is science necklace. it's a generic atom model. it takes 15, 20 minutes to print one out.
and it's a little bitty thing. this planet earth over here, that's about a four hour build. i've had things literally take overnight. but still faster than you could do it by hand. this is a piece i did several years ago. my daughter was in the high school musical, school house rock live. i'm talking with the director about ways that i might be able to help out and contribute.
he said, "i'd like a costume. "i need a couple of costumes." and he showed me the book. it had for the sun in the interplanet janet sequence kind of a statue of liberty thing with a glittery crown and a bathing beauty ribbon that said the sun. he said, "this is really boring." i said, "you want vegas showgirl, right?" "yeah."
so i designed essentially a shoulder harness out of some scrap aluminum i had, and i designed these two pieces to go on the shoulders and hold at 90 degree angles some wooden sticks. went up and went out to the side, with a wire across the top and that fabulous gold lame fabric sewn to it for the upper arc, with a slot cut for the head, and then a poncho for the rest of it.
it could be put on or taken off in seconds. it was lightweight, would last through two dress rehearsals and five performances, it's all it needed to last. so that thing was just pop riveted on to the aluminum. but could i have done that in a wood shop or in a metal shop, yeah, sure. but i was also able to do it just printing it out and tinkering with it. one of them is around here,
one of the first iterations. i added the cutouts there to speed up the build process. that saved me about half an hour by not printing those little semicircular bits. ^i tell you, when that girl walked out on stage ^and the spotlight hit her, you know it was the sun. ^there was no introduction necessary. it really looked great on stage. here's a sample of what gcode looks like.
as you can see, it looks an awful lot like gobbledygook. most of it is xyz coordinates. and it's page after page after page. you can have four or five megabytes of text. that's a lot of text. and yes, you could edit it by hand, if you dared. i don't. that's what it looks like. where can we go with this?
what can we do? 3d printing is used a great deal for rapid prototyping. so an engineer can, in the space of a few hours, for less than $1 in materials, have a part that he can hand a customer. or try on to another piece and see if it fits. and play around with, "i need to add a tab here. "i need a cutout here. "this needs to be slightly different shape."
and very quickly prototype things that would be very expensive to do any other way. you can do small production runs. if you hand me a 3d file, i can print you out five of them, whereas any other manufacturing technique it would cost thousands of dollars to set up the machines to create them, whereas if there's a 3d file, boom, you can just send it to the printer. you can deliver parts at a distance.
i remember my car broke down when i was down in strongsville a couple years ago. i desperately wished that they'd had a 3d printer because we could have just printed out the part right there. they didn't have it in stock. we could have just printed it out. so i wound up just using a hose clamp. it's been fine ever since. sometimes low tech solutions work just fine.
a couple years ago, the international space station needed a particular wrench to fix a piece that had broken. it would have taken two years to get that tool on the manifest for a resupply ship. they emailed the wrench to the space station and printed it out on orbit. within a day, they were back in operation. you could imagine disaster relief, being able to 3d print shelters in an earthquake zone
or a flood zone. what we're doing right now is we're printing replacement bone and cartilage from your own cells, so there's no risk of rejection. let's say somebody lost a piece of their jaw to an accident or cancer surgery, something like that. they can design the part, print it in bone cell, implant it, and then your own living bone will grow into that matrix.
and there's no risk of rejection because it's your own tissue. replacement organs, someday. yes, you can print a working firearm. that genie is out of the bottle. thingiverse will not host it. google sketchup 3d warehouse will not host it. but those files are out there and it can be done. the options for jewelry, art, and design.
there are clothing designers that are printing things that cannot be manufactured any other way. really, really cool. there's even a 3d pen that you can sculpt in space. it just extrudes the plastic. you just keep feeding it in. architecture, civil engineering, and someday, captain picard, "tea, earl gray, hot," and there it is. who knows where things are going?
^we are really early days of this technology ^and the sky is literally the limit. ^your imagination is literally the limit. that's what i got. (crowd applauding) marty, you've been using this in your classes. how have you been using it in your classroom? - we use solidworks, so the students, practically any mechanical and manufacturing studio
uses solidworks. so they can take solidworks and take it right straight to the 3d printer, because solidworks can make stl files, and do that. so we're using it in our capstone class to make prototypes. that way they can look at it and see how does it fit, what's the size, how does the handle look, how does the grip feel, that type of thing. then they can just really quickly change it.
also trying to play around with getting things to print properly is always a trick. you could use it in a strength materials class to demonstrate strength materials concepts, because theoretically, you have something like a tube will have 75% of the strength of a solid rod, but about 50% of weight. so you could do that by changing the amount of shells, about 10% of the fill, then you could make the solid rod
and test it that way. those are other things that can be done with it from an educational point of view. so that's a really neat thing. i downloaded a tensile sample, so i've used that to break in with different shells. and then also the way you print it, if you print it horizontally versus vertically, makes a very big different in the strength.
if you print it horizontally, the layers are one way, but if you print it vertically, you have the individual layers going up. so you have different-- it's not as cohesive. - easier to pull apart. right, wood grain. and your shear strength would be very different depending on what orientation you had it printed in.
- so it's little things like that from more of a theoretical structure point of view. ways of using it in the classroom right now. - [man] does the college have a license for it, or is it free, or is it-- - we teach there different levels of classes for it. we've got solidworks loaded in three or four classrooms. we teach intro and then we teach advanced, and then we have a higher level solidworks class.
- [man] but it's an expensive piece of software? - you can get a student version for like 99 bucks. but i think we have an institutional license for it. - it's an industry standard tool. - in fact, it's getting to the point where we're talking about not even teaching autocad 2d. not even doing it. - i have a student who wants to do his cad 3 project, he has a 3d printer at home.
this was a great time to learn a little more about it, but like you said, maybe he should use solidworks. i don't know. - it's not a difficult software to learn. we've got some phenomenal teachers. it's a great tool. just learning that alone will help make someone value added to local industries. - a program like form z you would use
for architectural models, you could still use that, just as long as you could make the gcode out of it? - oh sure, yeah. if it'll output a standard 3d file, .obg or .stl, you can bring it in to replicator g or any other software tool that talks to 3d printers. you could design your room and scale it down
and print it out and show it to a client. this is the design you talked about, is this really what you want? - [marty] the program that his son is in does that routinely. in fact, they're designing a shopping center to be built in mayfield high school, in the garage at mayfield high school. they do that all on the 3d printer.
- yeah, zach's learning solidworks now. they've got a really nice little maker space down there. they have a bunch of 3d printers. they got computer controlled routers, lathe, laser engravers, it's a really nice little program. and they've got like 98% of their students either going to a four year school or getting a job or going into the military right off the bat. - or come here.- or come here.
- [man] when you say lathe, is it an additive lathe? - it's subtractive. but it's computer controlled. - do they have additive lathes, which would instead of, you know here, we're moving in a z axis direction. you could picture where you built the layer and push it out, build a layer and-- - [marty] it's a traditional lathe
like we have here at our shop. - do they have this kind of thing, or not? - no. the thing you described doesn't really exist. the plastic would have to stretch, bigger and bigger and bigger. no, you just print out a layer and print out another layer so you can see the little 3d knot, the spiral knot thing taking shape there.
thanks for coming, folks.
appreciate it. phil, thank you. diana, thanks for setting it up, making it happen. - thank you, corrie.- thanks.
