[music] hi my name is victor ruiz andi'm a student intern at armstrong flight research center here at edwards air force base. i'min the dale reed flight research lab where where we produce small scale aircraft for flightresearch. one of our most useful tools here
z corporation 3d printing technology, is the 3d printer, it allows to rapidly prototypeanything we need for any or our small aircrafts. the first part of producing a 3d printed partis the design. we use any 3d modeling software to design anything we need to any design specifications.from there we export an .stl file and import it into our program that actually prepares thefile for the 3d printer. as you can see there
is a blue material that is representativeof the support plastic that is built around the 3d printed part that we are trying tocreate. so when the part is finished getting prepared and oriented we actually send itto the 3d printer. so the 3d printer uses two materials to make the parts. one is theactual material that forms the part and the other is the support plastic. the supportplastic is later dissolved in a base material that leaves you with a finished product. sothe 3d printer actually melts the plastic that we input into it and lays it out layerby layer until the part is completely built from the ground up. so here we can take alook inside.
a 3d printer works much like a normal printer. right here on the tray wehave the current model that's being produced. and in the back we have the unit that actuallydispenses the melted plastic. and this particular model is going to take about 17 hours to complete.
so here are some of the things that we've already made with the 3d printer. one is asmall scale version of an frc robot. and another is a servo cover to protect the servos thatare articulating the wings on one of our planes.
