The years up to the start of were an adolescence for 3D printing. New technologies became available such as Electron Beam Melting and Binder Jetting, medical advances were made, and the RepRap movement became viable.
In however, US patent law meant that within a few years 3D printers would become cheap enough for everybody to have one in their home if they wished.
Dr Khoshnevis refined and improved his house 3D printing technology — called Contour Crafting. In , , real estate went down… and with it went construction, and the support I was getting from industry disappeared.
Without funding or support, yet fully confident Contour Crafting could change the world, Dr Khoshnevis embarked on his multi-planetary construction 3D printing vision. The idea was deceptively simple: if we could print concrete on a 3D printer on Earth, an adapted version could be made that could print with locally-sourced lunar regolith to create Moon or Mars bases for permanent settlements in the near future.
A patent expired between end tail end of and the beginning of Big deal, patents expire all the time right? This patent was owned by a now-very-large company called Stratasys, for Fused Deposition Modeling technology.
FDM is the simplest 3D printing technology; it involves heating up a plastic filament until it melts, and then extrudes it out layer-by-layer. Since the technology could be replicated the most cheaply, business-minded hobbyists and small businesses watched on eagerly for the patent to fall into public domain so they could create their own versions. The two biggest events in the history of 3D printing, for every day fans, was firstly the development of the RepRap 3D printer.
This showed that low cost 3D printers could be done, and that most of the 3D printer parts could be 3D printed by another printer. The second event was the expiration of the FDM patent. This meant that anyone could not build these cheap 3D printers with no legal issues, and set the tone for incredible advances in the industry. Makerbot were supporters of the open source community, and their first printer, called Cupcake CNC, could be built entirely from parts downloadable from Thingiverse.
Demand exploded, and Makerbot had to ask their customers for help to create parts for their backlog of orders. Makerbot were becoming the early kings of affordable desktop 3D printers. Organovo, a 3D bioprinting firm, managed to create the first 3D printed blood vessel. This was managed on a new 3D bioprinter which showed significant promise for the future creation of whole organs such as kidneys and hearts.
In recent years, online 3D printing service companies had sprung up to capitalize on the growing demand for 3D printed parts. These services work by allowing users to upload models they have either designed or downloaded, and pay for them to be 3D printed and mailed to their door.
Some even allow users to sell their designs on an online marketplace and get paid for their designs. Companies like Shapeways, Sculpteo, i. Anyone who had designed something on their computers at home could if they had deep enough pockets have their model 3D printed in gold. The possibilities for custom and high fashion 3D printed jewelry expanded.
Also in , Kor Ecologic produced the first 3D printed car. The car, called Urbee, uses electric motors and gets miles to the gallon. Though Makerbot had dominated the open source, desktop 3D printer market, competition was about to toughen up. Ultimaker was established in in Geldermalsen, Netherlands, and released the first Ultimaker 3D printer in March The Ultimaker Original was made from laser-cut plywood and proved an enormous success, launching them into the spotlight.
Though the original patents for Stereolithography had expired over five years before, nobody had yet been able to create an affordable SLA 3D printer. Objet Geometries had gone from strength to strength since the early s, improving their PolyJet technology that could print in full-color. This eventually led to possibly the biggest acquisition in the history of the 3D printing industry. On April 16th , Stratasys announced that it had merged with Objet in an all-stock transaction, with Stratasys being the surviving company.
Despite competition from Ultimaker, and open source fans Aleph Objects who produce Lulzbot 3D printers , Makerbot were still doing very well. The founders of Makerbot have all since departed, and their newest machines are no longer open source.
The US Government ordered Defense Distributed to remove the designs three days later, but the gun had already been downloaded over , times. Metal 3D printing has recently become big talk, but before when tens of startups appeared, the industry was dominated by a few large players like EOS, Arcam and SLM Solutions.
A few years after turning his attention to space, Dr Khoshnevis won NASA grand prizes, winning key prize money to further the research. Technologies for building vertical structures such as hangars, shade walls, radiation protection walls, blast protection walls, and horizontal structures most particularly the landing pads, roads, we demonstrated the feasibility of those entirely to be made with in situ material.
My hope and expectation is that those technologies will eventually be used for planetary missions. The following year, a more wholesome achievement in 3D printing was realized. NASA announced they had used a 3D printer in space and created the first 3D printed object in space in The second stage in the history of 3D printing brings us to the decade of the 90s.
Stereolithography was the first 3D printing method which paved the way for the technology to grow and prosper. Although the technology was patented in , it took another years to build the first 3D Printer. These machines were charting unexplored frontiers but still, a lot of years of research had to be put in it to make it commercially viable.
These machines were slow to operate and still required some amount of manual intervention. The research went on until the s. The third stage to understanding the history of 3D printing starts from the new century.
Almost 20 years had passed since the first paper was published and technology was patented but still, the technology was in its infancy.
This was the time for the technology to grow and showcase its true potential. In , a new breakthrough was achieved. First 3D printed organ was implanted in a human body. The scientists at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, 3D printed the synthetic building blocks of human bladders. This newly generated tissue was then implanted in the human body. This was the decade when the Bio-Printing took center stage and came up with exciting and prospective inventions.
Scientists were eager to understand more and more about the technology and use it in the medical field due to its main feature of customization. This was a golden period in the development of 3D printing in the medical application.
Many start-ups started creating medical applications like printing a functional miniature kidney, building prosthetic limbs and other complex parts.
Scientists even bio-printed the first blood vessels. In , the open-source movement took over and Dr. Its upgrade was a self-replicating printer. Suddenly, people everywhere had access to printers and they could print tangible products from just their ideas. This is a stepping stone to stereolithography SLA. Charles Hull invented stereolithography, a process similar to 3D printing that uses technology to create smaller versions of objects so they can be tested before spending time and money on creating the actual product.
The object is printed layer by layer, rinsed with a solvent, and hardened with an ultraviolet light. The process uses computer-aided designs CAD to create the 3D models. It uses additive manufacturing and a powder polymer—typically nylon—to create objects.
The first machines, the great expectations, and the many 3D printing applications that are now flourishing. The first 3D printing attempts are granted to Dr Kodama for his development of a rapid prototyping technique.
He was the first to describe a layer by layer approach for manufacturing, creating an ancestor for SLA or Stereolithography : a photosensitive resin was polymerized by an UV light. Unfortunately, he did not file the patent requirement before the deadline. This 3D printing attempt was also using a stereolithography process. At the same time, Charles Hull was also interested in the technology and submitted a first patent for stereolithography SLA in In , at the University of Texas, Carl Deckard brought a patent for the SLS technology , another 3D printing technique in which powder grains are fused together locally by a laser.
In the meantime, Scott Crump, a co-founder of Stratasys Inc. In less than ten years, the three main technologies of 3D printing were patented and 3D printing was born!
Now that the basics were established, the evolution of additive manufacturing is pretty fast. The main 3D printers manufacturers are emerging, new technologies are perfected, and 3D modeling tools start to be developed as well, bringing additive manufacturing to the next level. Its industrial quality is today recognized worldwide in SLS technology Selective Laser Sintering technology for plastics and metals. In , the Fused Deposition Modeling patent was issued to Stratasys, which developed many 3D printers for both professionals and individuals.
From to , the main actors of the 3D printing sector emerged with various techniques:. At the same time, we can see that more and more new CAD tools, allowing to create 3D models, are becoming available and developed, with, for example, the creation of Sanders Prototype now known as Solidscape , one of the first actors to develop specific tools for additive manufacturing. In , the millennium saw the first 3D printed kidney, but we would have to wait 13 more years to see it transplanted into a patient.
Yes, it is possible to 3D print a 3D printer. This open-source project led to the spreading of the FDM 3D desktop 3D printers, and of the popularity of the technology in the makers community. In , 3D printing reached an even greater media presence thanks to another medical application: the first 3D printed prosthetic limb. Nowadays, combined with 3D scanning, 3D printed medical prosthesis and orthosis are more and more cheaper and faster to get for the patient.
0コメント