TECHNOLOGY
Move over 3D Printing. We’ve RLP
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a revolutionary new form of 3D printing that can produce large objects such as chairs in a fraction of the time of regular printers. Rapid Liquid Printing physically draws in 3D space within a gel suspension, and enables the creation of large scale, customized products made of real-world materials. Compared with other techniques we believe this is
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| SCREENTEX | February - March 2018
the first development to combine industrial materials with extremely fast print speeds in a precisely controlled process to yield largescale products. 3D printing hasn’t taken off as a mainstream manufacturing process f or three main reasons: 1) it’s too slow compared to conventional processes like injection molding, casting,
milling, etc. 2) it’s limited by scale – although it’s good for creating small components, it’s not possible to produce large scale objects 3) the materials are typically lowquality compared to industrial materials. Rapid Liquid Printing addresses all of these limitations: it is incredibly fast (producing structures in a matter of minutes), designed for large scale products