New method makes 3D printing 100 times faster

Endlessly waiting for your 3D print to complete will no longer be necessary. Carbon3D has developed a technique to make 3D printing a 100 times faster. Carbon3D does not print layer by layer. Their Continous Liquid Interface Production technique – CLIP for short – uses oxygen and light to selectively cure the material. The printed object is drawn from a resin bath. The lower part of this bath contains a material that is best compared to a soft contact lens: it is permeable to UV light and oxygen. Where the resin is exposed to oxygen, it will not harden; where there is no exposure to oxygen the resin will be cured with UV light. The Carbon3D technology makes it possible to measure the oxygen very precisely, as small as a few dozen micron, say two or three blood cells together.

There are numerous advantages to this technology. Smaller details mean a smoother surface. The smaller details also result in stronger objects. And it is much faster as well. Carbon3D still needs to make production ready equipment to make their promises a reality. To this end it has attracted a total of 41 million dollars in investments from famous investors such as Sequoia Capital and Silver Lake Kraftwerk. Carbon3D has produced prototypes for a feasibility study. In the below accelerated video Carbon3D demonstrates their technology. In reality the CLIP process would need 6,5 minutes to print the object. Other 3D technology would take 3 hours for the same result.