Therefore, in terms of printing time, we have a savings of about 40%.”Ĭhen 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 3-D printers. So with this system, we’re not building the supports. “When you’re 3-D printing complex shapes, half of the time you are building the parts that you need, the other half of the time you’re building the supports. In addition to the environmental and cost impacts of material wastage, traditional 3-D printing processes using supports is also time-consuming, Chen said. So if we can save 30% on material that would have gone into printing these supports, that is a huge cost saving for 3-D printing for biomedical purposes,” Chen said. “For standard FDM printers, the materials cost is something like $50 per kilogram, but for bioprinting, it’s more like $50 per gram. “A lot of the material they use are very expensive–we’re talking small bottles that cost between $500 to $1000 each.” “I work with biomedical doctors who 3-D print using biomaterials to build tissue or organs,” Chen said. Chen said that testing of the new prototype has shown it saves around 35% in materials used to print objects. The pins rise up as the printer progressively builds the product. The new prototype instead uses a programmable, dynamically-controlled surface made of moveable metal pins to replace the printed supports. Traditional 3-D printing using the Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) technique, prints layer-by-layer, directly onto a static metal surface. The work, led by Yong Chen, professor of industrial and systems engineering and PhD student Yang Xu, has been published in Additive Manufacturing. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering have created a low-cost reusable support method to reduce the need for 3-D printers to print these wasteful supports, vastly improving cost-effectiveness and sustainability for 3-D printing. The materials the supports are made from often cannot be re-used, and so they’re discarded, contributing to the growing problem of 3-D printed waste material.įor the first time, researchers in USC Viterbi’s Daniel J. ![]() However, these supports must be manually removed after printing, which requires finishing by hand and can result in shape inaccuracies or surface roughness. However, the process also creates a large amount of expensive and unsustainable waste and takes a long time, making it difficult for 3-D printing to be implemented on a wide scale.Įach time a 3-D printer produces custom objects, especially unusually-shaped products, it also needs to print supports–printed stands that balance the object as the printer creates layer by layer, helping maintain its shape integrity. Image/Yong Chenģ-D printing has the potential to revolutionize product design and manufacturing in a vast range of fields-from custom components for consumer products, to 3-D printed dental products and bone and medical implants that could save lives. A new dynamically-controlled base for 3-D printing (center) will reduce the need for printed supports (left), cutting wastage and saving time.
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