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Company Unveils Radical, Layerless 3D Printing Technology "25 to 100 Times Faster" Than Standard 3D Printing

It looks more like "growing" a part than printing one

By Rain Noe - March 18, 2015

in Digital Fabrication

For the past two years, a company called Carbon3D has been secretly developing a new type of 3D printing—one that would be far faster than polyjet, stereolithography and selective laser sintering. This week they pulled the sheets off, and it looks pretty nuts.

Called CLIP, for Continuous Liquid Interface Production, the technology combines elements of SLA with a photochemical process, and the result is that parts are not so much printed—that is, they're not laid down/cured/sintered one layer at a time—so much as they are grown, out of what seems an impossibly shallow dish of liquid:

It looks even more eerie when producing a taller object:

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It works by combining photochemical curing processes with precisely controlled flows of oxygen drifting through the liquid resin. Oxygen stymies the curing process, and Carbon3D's proprietary technology can place the oxygen precisely in the negative space of your part while the UV light they hit it with cures everything else.

The heart of the CLIP process is a special window that is transparent to light and permeable to oxygen, much like a contact lens. By controlling the oxygen flux through the window, CLIP creates a "dead zone" — a thin layer of uncured resin between the window and the object.
This makes it possible to grow without stopping. As a continuous sequence of UV images are projected, the object is drawn from the resin bath. Sophisticated software manages the entire process by controlling the variables.

The first benefit is speed. Take this complex object here, which is a latticed ball that's 51mm in diameter:

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That part took 6.5 minutes in a CLIP machine, and Carbon3D claims the same part would take three hours on a polyjet, 3.5 hours on an SLS machine and 11.5 hours with SLA.

The second benefit, according to Carbon3D, is the quality of the part:

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.
Parts printed with CLIP are much more like injection-molded parts. CLIP produces consistent and predictable mechanical properties, creating parts that are smooth on the outside and solid on the inside.

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This kind of breakthrough wasn't cheap to develop, and the company has $40 million behind it thanks to some big-dog venture capitalists who believe in the tech. "If 3D printing hopes to break out of the prototyping niche it has been trapped in for decades," said Sequoia Capital partner Jim Goetz, "we need to find a disruptive technology that attacks the problem from a fresh perspective and addresses 3D printing's fundamental weaknesses…. [When we saw what Carbon3D] had invented, it was immediately clear to us that 3D printing would never be the same."

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Paulin Guéry

9 years ago

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That is really cool.
But why don't they move the projector to the top and make the object go down?
I remember seeing a Kickstarter project that worked that way and allowed anyone to use a standard DLP projector. Of course it only worked with a special resin, but with a dedicated projector, maybe it could work with other materials.

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form Nique

9 years ago

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The resolution is far superior and will definitely help get to a more "finished" model much faster than the previous layering techniques. The steps from previous machines always bothered me and allows for less surface work in the shop. Very excited about this and look forward to its release. In this money world, more power to them for finding a new technique and running with it. I am against people trying to profit off of others hard work and believe in this day and age sometimes it is better to keep your ideas safe. Its not like they found a new cure for cancer and have kept it to themselves....

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Sam A

9 years ago

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This seems like a technology that provides a relatively minor improvement in speed and resolution, but which is very easy to lock up with patents and proprietary formulas. The comparison photo CLIP vs 3D printing does not specify what older technology it is being compared to (is that an SLA part?)

Don't get me wrong, figuring out a balance point that allows for continuous layer printing is impressive, it's just not something I'm going to get excited about if they keep it to themselves. At best, this is the inspiration for someone else to figure out an alternate method for continuous printing and publish that method without trying to lock it up.

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- Guy Garcia
  
  Sam A
  
  9 years ago
  
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  how is it a minor improvement on speed? !?! This is literally faster than any 3D printer i have ever seen
  
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