How do 3D printers work? And what are their limitations?
In: Technology
Most of them work by extruding small dots of molten plastic onto a tray. It puts all of the dots of one layer down, moves up a touch, then puts down all of the dots of the next layer. It repeats until the object is completed.
There are five main limitations:
– It can only make things out of materials that can be printed. You can’t make objects out of metal or ceramic or other materials that can’t be heated and extruded.
– They can (generally) only print one material at a time. This means that printing complex objects (like a wire) are not possible, further limiting what can be printed.
– The printer can only make a dot so small – called its resolution – so the detail of any object you print is limited by the resolution of the printer.
– It can only print an object that fits inside of the print area. You can get around this by printing multiple small objects and putting them together, but it is still limited by the size.
– They take a _long time_ to print. Since they go dot by dot, it can take hours to print an object of any real size.
For these reasons, they are primarily used for rapid prototyping of simple objects or when a variety of plastic items might be required (for example, they have one on ISS because they don’t know what type of tools or parts the might need). For anything of scale, traditional manufacturing is still faster and cheaper.
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