3D printing company Carbon3D has developed a new process that it claims is at least 25 times faster than other resin printing techniques.
While the company is being secretive about some of the details, according a report in Science its Continuous Liquid Interface Production, or CLIP, process uses photosensitive resin and a balance of UV light to cure the material and oxygen to inhibit the polymerisation. In this way, CLIP continuously grows objects from a pool of resin as can be seen in the demonstration video above.
The company says that in some cases the technique can be 100 times faster than traditional 3D printing – if we can call anything about 3D printing “traditional”.
The company is also claiming better quality for the products made using the process.
“Traditionally made 3D printed parts are notoriously inconsistent. The mechanical properties vary depending on the direction the parts were printed due to the layer-by-layer approach,” the company says.
“Parts printed with CLIP are much more like injection-molded parts”, with “consistent and predictable mechanical properties”.
The printer uses UV-emitting lasers and a transparent and oxygen-permeable window to control oxygen flow to the liquid resin, with the laser curing those parts of the resin not exposed to the oxygen.
