3D Printing News & Discussions

[wjfox]

3D printed guns: Warnings over growing threat of 3D firearms

1 day ago

Last month police said they made one of the largest seizures of 3D printed firearm components in the UK.

Officers from the Metropolitan Police's Specialist Crime Command had discovered what they alleged was a "suspected makeshift 3D firearms factory" at a home in London on 7 October.

Officers said it demonstrated how "the emerging threat of 3D firearms continues to evolve".

The discovery comes as some experts also warn of a growing threat.

Early versions of 3D printed guns were unreliable, single-shot weapons. Now the National Crime Agency (NCA) tells the BBC the guns are "credible and viable".

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-63495123

[wjfox]

Major housing development to be 3D-printed

13th November 2022

Work has started on the first large-scale community of 3D-printed homes in the U.S., with reservations to be available in 2023.

Lennar, a leading homebuilder, is collaborating with ICON, a construction technologies company pioneering large-scale 3D printing. Together, they are developing 100 new homes at the master-planned community of Wolf Ranch, by Hillwood Communities, which is located north of Austin, Texas.

[...]

"For the first time in the history of the world, what we're witnessing here is a fleet of robots building an entire community of homes," said Jason Ballard, CEO and co-founder of ICON. "And not just any homes; homes that are better in every way ... better design, higher strength, higher energy performance and comfort, and increased resiliency. In the future, I believe robots and drones will build entire neighbourhoods, towns, and cities, and we'll look back at Lennar's Wolf Ranch community as the place where robotic construction at scale began. We still have a long way to go, but I believe this marks a very exciting and hopeful turn in the way we address housing issues in the world."

Read more: https://www.futuretimeline.net/blog/202 ... nology.htm

[weatheriscool]

New nanoscale 3D printing material could offer better structural protection for satellites, drones, and microelectronics
https://phys.org/news/2022-11-nanoscale ... rones.html
by Laura Castañón, Stanford University

Science fiction envisions rapid 3D printing processes that can quickly create new objects out of any number of materials. But in reality, 3D printing is still limited in the properties and types of materials that are available for use, especially when printing at very small scales.

Researchers at Stanford have developed a new material for printing at the nanoscale—creating structures that are a fraction of the width of a human hair—and used it to print minuscule lattices that are both strong and light. In a paper published in Science, the researchers demonstrated that the new material is able to absorb twice as much energy than other 3D-printed materials of a comparable density. In the future, their invention could be used to create better lightweight protection for fragile pieces of satellites, drones, and microelectronics.

"There's a lot of interest right now in designing different types of 3D structures for mechanical performance," says Wendy Gu, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and a corresponding author on the paper. "What we've done on top of that is develop a material that is really good at resisting forces, so it's not just the 3D structure, but also the material that provides very good protection."

Introducing metal nanoclusters

To design a better material for 3D printing, Gu and her colleagues incorporated metal nanoclusters—tiny clumps of atoms—into their printing medium. The researchers are printing with a method known as two-photon lithography, where the printing material is hardened through a chemical reaction initiated by laser light. They found that their nanoclusters were very good at jump-starting this reaction and resulted in a material that was a composite of the polymer printing medium and metal.

[weatheriscool]

3D Printing Market Data Q3 2022: Additive Manufacturing Markets Totaled $3.1B, Representing 20% Growth Year over Year

NEW YORK, NY – December 27, 2022 – Q3 2022 saw continuing year over year growth for the additive manufacturing market, coming in 20% higher compared to the same period in 2021 despite a rising number of entities reporting a challenging macroeconomic environment and changing customer behavior. The third quarter of 2022 was the fourth consecutive quarter that the total AM industry saw revenue exceeding $3B. SmarTech’s market totals include hardware, materials, software, and services.

Scott Dunham, SmarTech Analysis EVP Research, commented, “With the reported conditions in the market, the sequential growth in additive once again declined slightly on a quarter over quarter basis, but still Q3 2022 saw the largest industry activity level for a third quarter in history. We are being cautious about our outlook for AM going forward, but we are still seeing plenty of demand out there for additive technologies. It varies company to company and market to market, but on the whole SmarTech is still optimistic about the AM industry’s potential heading into 2023.”

https://www.smartechanalysis.com/report ... a-q3-2022/

[weatheriscool]

New research takes step towards laser printed medical electronics
https://phys.org/news/2023-03-laser-med ... onics.html
by Lancaster University

Researchers have taken a major step towards 3D laser-printed materials that could be used in surgical procedures to implant or repair medical devices.

A team of scientists, led by researchers at Lancaster University, has developed a method to 3D-print flexible electronics using the conducting polymer polypyrrole, and they have shown that it is possible to directly print these electrical structures on or in living organisms (roundworms).

Their findings are reported in the paper Creating 3D objects with integrated electronics via multiphoton fabrication in vitro and in vivo, which is published in Advanced Material Technologies.

[weatheriscool]

People Are 3D Printing Anti-Tank Rocket Launchers Now
https://www.vice.com/en/article/ak3wxa/ ... t-launcher

For those without a national defense budget or security clearance, a knockoff AT4 is poised to enter the market. Developed by hobbyist designers in Texas using a 3D-printer and other homemade parts, the weapon is not yet ready to take out a tank—or even a flimsy plywood target, as a recent test demonstration revealed. But the unveiling of the cloneable launcher and its powerful plastic rockets could have major implications for modern warfare, providing armies and insurgencies with easy access to cheap and disposable anti-armor weapons.

While untraceable “ghost guns” have stirred controversy and complicated efforts at gun control, advances in using 3D-printing technology to make heavier artillery have largely flown under the radar. Law enforcement documents obtained by VICE News show Mexican drug cartels are already developing their own improvised grenade launchers.

[weatheriscool]

Inverse design method used to improve porous surface texture of 3D printed objects
https://techxplore.com/news/2023-03-inv ... xture.html

by Bob Yirka , Tech Xplore

A multi-institutional team of mechanical engineers and materials scientists has developed an inverse design method to improve the texture of porous surfaces on 3D printed structures. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes developing micrometer-sized triangles and ribbons to create a lattice upon which to build surface structures.

In the natural world, the arrangement of cells allows for the creation of unique porous surface structures—leaves, flowers and human skin all have a remarkable degree of surface variability with unique visible features and specific characteristics, such as repelling water. Recreating such features using technology as simple as a 3D printer has been impossible.

[weatheriscool]

Top 10 3-d printers on the market?

Here are the top 10 3D printers on the market as of April 2023:

Formlabs Form 3 - A resin-based 3D printer that delivers high-quality prints with a large build volume.

Ultimaker S5 - A versatile 3D printer that can handle a wide range of materials and has a large build volume.

Prusa i3 MK3S - A reliable and affordable 3D printer with a large community of users and an open-source design.

MakerBot Replicator+ - A popular desktop 3D printer that offers high-quality prints with ease of use.

LulzBot Mini 2 - A compact and reliable 3D printer that can handle a variety of materials and has a large build volume.

Raise3D Pro2 Plus - A large-format 3D printer that can print with a wide range of materials and has advanced features such as automatic bed leveling.

FlashForge Creator Pro - A versatile 3D printer that can print with a variety of materials and has a dual extruder system for multi-color or multi-material prints.

BCN3D Sigma R19 - A reliable and high-performance 3D printer that can handle a wide range of materials and has a large build volume.

Sindoh 3DWOX DP201 - A user-friendly and reliable 3D printer that has automated features such as filament loading and bed leveling.

Anycubic Photon Mono X - A resin-based 3D printer that offers high-resolution prints with a large build volume.

It's worth noting that the 3D printing market is constantly evolving, and new products may be released in the future that could compete with or surpass the ones listed here.

[weatheriscool]

Shell Wall tech claimed to reduce weight of concrete walls by over 70%
By Ben Coxworth


https://newatlas.com/3d-printing/shell- ... ete-walls/
April 03, 2023

3D concrete printing (3DCP) technology is already known to offer a more efficient approach to constructing buildings. A new type of 3DCP, however, is said to be even better, resulting in walls that are a claimed 72% lighter than their conventional counterparts.

At most 3DCP building sites, a robotically operated extruder nozzle moves in straight lines parallel to the ground, building up molds for walls one horizontal layer at a time. Once the hollow centers of those molds have been filled with rebar and more concrete, the walls are complete.

According to Dr. Mania Aghaei Meibodi and colleagues at the University of Michigan's DART Laboratory (Digital Architecture Research Technologies), such setups use more concrete than is necessary, plus they limit the architectural features of buildings to fairly simple shapes. That's where the university's Shell Wall system is intended to come in.

[weatheriscool]

3D-printed alloy 600 times as resistant to stress as existing alloys
https://phys.org/news/2023-04-3d-printe ... lloys.html
by Bob Yirka , Phys.org

A team of materials scientists from NASA working with a colleague from The Ohio State University and another from HX5 LLC has developed a 3D printing process that produces an alloy that is much more resistant to stress than others now in use. Their study is reported in Nature.

As scientists develop new ways to produce energy and explore space, a need has arisen for materials that can survive under extreme conditions—those used to make rocket nozzles, for example. To meet that need, materials scientists have been creating alloys that are ever more resistant to heat and other stressful elements. In this new effort, the research team took a big step forward by developing a 3D process to create an alloy that is much more resilient than anything created thus far.

Prior research has shown that adding ceramic to metal alloys gives them more resilience. Unfortunately, adding ceramic has proven to be problematic due to the difference in characteristics of metals and ceramics—the lighter ceramic bits tend to float to the top when added to molten metal. To overcome that problem, the researchers turned to 3D printing.

[UnixT]

Science fiction envisions rapid 3D printing processes that can quickly create new objects out of any number of materials. But in reality, 3D printing is still limited in the properties and types of materials that are available for use, especially when printing at very small scales.

Researchers at Stanford have developed a new material for printing at the nanoscale—creating structures that are a fraction of the width of a human hair—and used it to print minuscule lattices that are both strong and light. In a paper published in Science, the researchers demonstrated that the new material is able to absorb twice as much energy than other 3D-printed materials of a comparable density. In the future, their invention could be used to create better lightweight protection for fragile pieces of satellites, drones, and microelectronics.

Research in the field of 3D printing is now popular. I think that soon new achievements will surprise us.

[weatheriscool]

New procedure allows micro-printing inside existing materials with greater accuracy
https://phys.org/news/2023-05-procedure ... uracy.html
by Michael O'Boyle, University of Illinois Grainger College of Engineering

3D printers form objects by layering melted plastic or metal, but this only works on large scales. What you need to fabricate microdevices for which the layering step is not feasible? What if it were possible to print directly into the bulk of an existing three-dimensional material?

The research groups of Lynford Goddard and Paul Braun, professors at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, have been collaborating to develop such a process. They use the technique of multiphoton lithography to print inside an existing porous material with high intensity laser light.

This allows the researchers to selectively modify regions of the interior and manufacture custom small-scale optical devices in a procedure called subsurface controllable refractive index via beam exposure, or SCRIBE. The two research groups recently announced a refinement to this procedure that gives them significantly tighter control over the resulting devices. The new procedure was recently published in ACS Photonics.

[weatheriscool]

3D printed elastic conductors for stretchable electronics

https://techxplore.com/news/2023-05-3d- ... onics.html
by Ingrid Fadelli , Tech Xplore

Three-dimensional (3D) printing has become increasingly advanced over the past few years and has been successfully used to create countless items, including toys, furniture and electronic components. As 3D printing equipment becomes more affordable, it could potentially also be used to fabricate soft electronic components for wearable devices.

Despite its promise in this area, so far 3D printing has rarely been successfully used to produce complex and flexible electronics. One reason for this is that solid-state elastic materials that can conduct electricity are difficult to print using existing inks.

Researchers at Korea Institute of Science and Technology recently demonstrated the successful use of 3D printing to create elastic components that can conduct electricity. Their proposed printing strategy, outlined in a paper in Nature Electronics, could potentially pave the way toward the large-scale printing of multi-functional and stretchable components for wearable devices.

The team's realization of elastic conductors using 3D printing was in great part enabled by a new emulsion-based composite ink they devised. This special ink consists of liquid components dispersed within a conductive elastomer, a rubbery material that conducts electricity.

[weatheriscool]

A breakthrough in ceramic 3D printing
https://techxplore.com/news/2023-05-bre ... ic-3d.html
by Peter Grad , Tech Xplore

For Chinese scientists at Jiangnan University, the shape of things to come rests on a ceramic slurry and 3D printing.

Led by Professor Liu Ren, university scientists developed a technique that permits the construction of complex shapes never before possible with traditional 3D printing. They achieved this by creating a ceramic concoction that turns solid almost instantly upon exposure to near-infrared light.

The benefits of earlier processes used in 3D printing were often offset by issues of accuracy, speed and economy.

Stereolithography, for instance, which employs laser beams to fuse small particles of plastic, metal, glass or ceramic powder into a solid object, generally requires the production of support structures to hold large-scale or oddly shaped structures in place until the components are solidified. This adds time and cost to large projects.

The use of supportive structures—whether in stereolithography or other related approaches—also requires their eventual removal. This introduces potential problems regarding dimensional precision and surface smoothness. Furthermore, removal of support structures could introduce micro-cracks and even structural failure due to added weight stress.

[wjfox]

Suspected 3D-printing weapons factory uncovered by NCA

1 hour ago

A man has been remanded in custody after police uncovered what is thought to be a 3D-printing weapons factory.

National Crime Agency (NCA) officers believe an industrial unit in Merton, south-west London, was being used to convert blank-firing guns into lethal weapons using 3D-printed parts.

Evan Girdlestone, 47, appeared before magistrates in Croydon on Saturday morning charged with offences under the Firearms Act. No pleas were entered.

[...]

Officers from the NCA's armed operations unit said they initially recovered what they believe to be a functioning converted weapon, and magazines filled with 9mm ammunition, from a car.

During a separate search of an industrial unit in the Lombard Road area of Merton, officers found an array of tools and machinery, including parts used in the manufacture of weapons and ammunition.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-65656305



Image source, National Crime Agency

[weatheriscool]

'You can 3D print one material through another, as if it were invisible': New 3D printing technique
https://techxplore.com/news/2023-05-3d- ... nique.html
by Heriot-Watt University, Heriot-Watt University

Scientists have developed an advanced technique for 3D printing that is set to revolutionize the manufacturing industry.

The group, led by Dr. Jose Marques-Hueso from the Institute of Sensors, Signals & Systems at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, has created a new method of 3D printing that uses near-infrared (NIR) light to create complex structures containing multiple materials and colors.

They achieved this by modifying a well-established 3D printing process known as stereolithography to push the boundaries of multi-material integration. A conventional 3D printer would normally apply a blue or UV laser to a liquid resin that is then selectively solidified, layer by layer, to build a desired object. But a major drawback of this approach has been the limitations in intermixing materials.

What is different about this latest project is that the scientists use a NIR light source capable of printing at far greater depths into the resin vat, and with no need to print in layers.

The findings hold tremendous opportunities for industry, particularly those that rely on specialist parts such as in health and electrical sectors.

[weatheriscool]

3D printing near net shape parts with no post-processing
https://phys.org/news/2023-06-3d-net-po ... ssing.html
by Lynn Shea, Carnegie Mellon University Mechanical Engineering

Carnegie Mellon University Professor Rahul Panat, and his team, were developing a new type of 3D printed Brain-Computer Interface (or BCI) device where custom micropillars capture the communication signals from neurons when they stumbled upon an unexpected problem: the micropillars in the array bent during sintering. These BCI devices, now called "CMU Arrays," stack millions of metal nanoparticles in 3D space and then sinter, i.e., fuse them together.

In a rather dramatic illustration, a time-lapse film from their experiment, the silver micropillars opened in a highly coordinated fashion like a blooming flower during the 12-hour sintering process to 150-300 °C. This phenomenon was completely unexpected as sintering theory predicts no permanent distortion, even under variable temperatures.

[weatheriscool]

"Bimetallic" 3D printing tech produces better, stronger metal items
By Ben Coxworth
June 22, 2023
https://newatlas.com/3d-printing/bimeta ... le-metals/

Different types of metal have different qualities, so combining them can result in items that outperform those made of any one metal. A new technique now allows such mixing to be performed by 3D printers, faster and easier than ever before.

Currently, one of the most common methods of 3D printing objects out of multiple metals incorporates a technique known as wire arc additive manufacturing.

In a nutshell, this involves utilizing a weld head to produce an electrical arc that melts a metal wire. That molten metal is deposited in successive layers, incrementally building up the desired item. And every time that a different metal is required within one print job, the process has to be paused so that a wire made of one metal can be swapped out for one made of another.

Seeking to streamline that process, a Washington State University team led by Prof. Amit Bandyopadhyay developed a new technique which incorporates two commercially available weld heads, each one loaded with a wire made of a different metal.

One head initially deposits one metal in a circular pattern, forming a ring. The other head then rushes in and deposits the other type of metal inside that ring, giving the structure a solid core. As the two metals proceed to cool, the outer ring shrinks at a faster rate than the inner core. This produces pressure at the interface between the two metals, binding them together.

The process is repeated over and over, layer by layer, ultimately resulting in a single "bimetallic" column.

So far the scientists have created bimetallic structures – such as a column with a stainless steel core contained within a milder steel casing – which were 33% to 42% stronger than equivalent structures made of either metal on its own.

[weatheriscool]

Revolutionary gel allows metal items to be 3D printed at room temperature
By Ben Coxworth
July 06, 2023
https://newatlas.com/3d-printing/copper ... mperature/

Although there are several methods of 3D-printing metal objects, all of them involve the application of heat – which isn't conducive to producing certain heat-sensitive electronics, among other things. A new gel, however, can be used to print such items at room temperature.

Created by a team of scientists at North Carolina State University, the material starts out as a solution consisting of copper microparticles suspended in water. Microparticles of another metal, known as eutectic gallium indium alloy (EGaIn) are then added, as is hydrochloric acid.

The latter sets the pH of the water to 1.0, removing oxides from the EGaln and thus temporarily turning it to a liquid-metal state. This causes the EGaln particles (now globules) to cling to the firmer copper particles, forming a network of copper particles connected by EGaln bridges. Methylcellulose is also added, to bulk up the mixture.

The resulting viscous gel can be extruded from the nozzle of an ordinary 3D printer at room temperature, building an item up one layer at a time. When the finished object is left to dry – at that same temperature – the water and hydrochloric acid evaporate. The end result is a rigid, highly electrically conductive three-dimensional object which is up to 97.5% metal (the rest being methylcellulose).

[weatheriscool]

Anker makes high-speed 3D printing even more affordable with the M5C
By Paul Ridden
August 02, 2023

https://newatlas.com/3d-printing/ankermake-m5c/

Last year, Anker breezed into the desktop 3D printing space with the AnkerMake M5, launching on Kickstarter to test the market and fund production. Now the company has announced a more affordable follow up called the M5C.

The M5 Kickstarter was a resounding success for Anker, with more than 11,000 backers helping to raise a funding pot of nearly US$9 million. The company's first 3D printer promised easy setup, super-fast print speeds, AI-based project monitoring, a built-in cooling system, and auto leveling. All for $499 if you were quick enough or $799 at the retail price.

The MC5 now features a one-piece design for easier setup, with an aluminum-alloy base that's reported to offer stability and reduce machine jitter. It does have a slightly smaller print volume of 220 x 220 x 150 mm (8.66 x 8.66 x 5.9 in), but retains the PEI magnetic plate for trouble-free removal of models, and features the same 49-point automatic bed leveling system as before.