WORLD
You Can Now 3D Print with Metal at Home
Baku, December 5 (AZERTAC). Dazzle someone with a tale of the 3D-printed future, where everyone, everywhere prints their own goods at home, and after the initial surprise that you can print anything from math tools to body parts wears off, you'll hear the same question: This is cool, but does it only print plastic?
Plastics may be the future, but they're not the perfect materials for everything we need. The holy grail of 3D printers is a model that can print a multitude of materials at once—imagine printing a working cell phone—but for now, it'd be nice to be able to print some good old-fashioned metal. Extremely costly options exist, but engineers at Michigan Technological University have developed a metal 3D printer that can be built for less than $2000.
"Metal was the last class of material that the low-cost open-source 3D printing community needed to complete their collection," Joshua Pearce, an associate professor at Michigan Tech's Open Sustainability Tech Lab and a co-author of a paper outlining the work to be published in IEEE Access, wrote in an email. "This helps us take one more step down the path to 'printing everything.'"
Metal parts are largely shaped by one of a trio of processes—casting, forging, and machining—or some combination of all three. Printing metal—that is, building a structure by fusing layer after layer of material—is more difficult than plastic largely because plastics can have lower melting points. Working with rapidly heated and cooled ABS plastic is less of an endeavor than developing a printer head that can work with molten iron.
Dazzle someone with a tale of the 3D-printed future, where everyone, everywhere prints their own goods at home, and after the initial surprise that you can print anything from math tools to body parts wears off, you'll hear the same question: This is cool, but does it only print plastic?
Plastics may be the future, but they're not the perfect materials for everything we need. The holy grail of 3D printers is a model that can print a multitude of materials at once—imagine printing a working cell phone—but for now, it'd be nice to be able to print some good old-fashioned metal. Extremely costly options exist, but engineers at Michigan Technological University have developed a metal 3D printer that can be built for less than $2000.