How do 3D printers work? And what are their limitations?
In: Technology
Ones you can buy for home use melt plastic and use motors to carefully place the melted plastic on a build plate. It builds the object one layer at a time, stacking the plastic on top of the previous layer. You can almost always see each individually when you look closely at something 3d printed.
There’s another type of home 3d printer where it uses UV light to solidify a layer of resin on the build plate. It works basically the same as above, but instead of melting plastic it uses a tiny LCD screen to stack the individual layers of solidified resin.
You can scale up both of these methods – for example, you can use the first method to make 3d printed chocolate, clay, cement (even things as big as entire houses).
You can scale up the second method to create parts in metal – picture a sandbox of metal dust and a laser scans a layer of the part sintering together the metal it hits, then it spreads more metal dust on top and repeats.
The limitations is a little more difficult to answer. You are limited in materials – for the first type you need something liquid that can stack without squishing itself apart. Additionally, the strength of the thing you print is also limited and not usually as strong as other manufacturing methods. Most industrial uses of 3d printing use the printer to make a mold which then they use in traditional manufacturing.
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