Solution invented by University of Southern California engineers can reduce 35% of the material used in FDM additive manufacturing and also provide time savings.
April 21, 2021
While 3D printing has provided a rapid platform for fabricating products in a way that is generally less time-consuming, it still has its drawbacks—one of the key ones being the amount of material waste it produces.
To solve this problem, researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) have created a low-cost printing method designed to reduce some of the major contributors of waste—supports that help maintain the integrity of printed objects that are removed after printing and discarded.
The team from USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering developed their solution for traditional 3D printing using the Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) technique, which typically prints layer-by-layer, directly onto a static metal surface. It’s best suited now for use in the medical field but can expand to other industries.
The method instead uses a programmable, dynamically controlled surface made of moveable metal pins to replace the printed supports that would normally be used to hold the object while it prints--especially for objects of unusual shape.
In the USC researchers’ technique, the pins rise as the printer progressively builds the product, which in testing have demonstrated saving of about 35% of the materials that would typically be used to print objects in this way, said Yong Chen, professor of industrial and systems engineering at USC Viterbi’s Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. He led the project with Ph.D. student Yang Xu.
“For standard FDM printers, the materials cost is something like $50 per kilogram, but for bioprinting, it’s more like $50 per gram,” Chen said in a press statement. “So if we can save 30% on material that would have gone into printing these supports, that is a huge cost saving for 3D printing for biomedical purposes.”
In addition to cost savings and reducing environmental impact with the solution, researchers said the new method also can save medical professionals time in the fabrication of a part, which can be crucial in a medical setting.