3D Printing Hype

[smackababy]

They are 3D printing with nonfood sugars, which could translate to metals if you get a 3D printer that can heat them enough. I assume it will end up being some sort of synthetic compound that has the strength to be used in everyday construction.

 

[JTsyo]

3D printed items are brittle pieces of junk... literally.
good for visualizing and prototyping, bbutnot good as commercial goods... or have I missed some quantum leaps in 3D printing tech.

as to 3D printing cheetos... um... 1st you have to make the "food" content. that is not going to be stored in a drum, and cheetoes are not plastic, wax, whattnot. Any food item to beprinted must be first "mixed in a liquid slurry form" before the nasty nasty synthetic final product would be printed.

i'll take a carrot instead.

3D printing with metals?... how is that possible (if at all).

Tech from the 80s. Laser sintering

Right now with the work being done on plastics and polymers we might get higher strength material in a few years. Right now I wouldn't trust ABS plastic parts to hold any real load. But I could see a day when you could print a custom bracket for a shelf and trust it to hold.

 

[Paul98]

You can create a mold for casting metal using a 3d printed model.

 

[Murloc]

I saw some stuff about weird liquid metal stuff that could be used.
I hold more hope for new materials though.
Casting metal in a mold is probably useless, the economic reasons to do that just aren't there imho, just go to the hardware store and buy it mass produced. Heating the thing up just to make a spoon would waste too much energy.

I saw pliers made out of a single block of plastic stuff, there were 2 materials in it though. Pretty amazing if you think at how the mechanism works (an axis around which 2 sticks rotate), there were no moving parts and it felt like some sort of hard rubber/plastic. I don't even know how it was made inside.
It was at some materials laboratory visit so I guess they showed off their cool stuff.
This sort of proves that it's possible to build not-brittle tools.
I had a run-of-the-mill 3D printed prototype in my hand too, it's brittle plastic and totally useless in practical uses.

I don't think it will be convenient to buy a seriously useful 3D printer as a private citizen, it's not like you buy non-consumable items every day.

But it might be interesting to lower the cost of setting up a small-scale industry of basic goods.
It would let poor countries to use technology to make their life better faster than the developed world did in the industrial revolution, if you need lower capital to buy a standardized printer and then you can go crazy on it. Assuming some cheap polymer is devised.

Kinda like the stuff with mobile phones, setting up a phone net has low costs because you just have to put antennas around. When we first got the phone it had huge infrastructure costs and you needed cables everywhere. Mobile technology allowed undeveloped countries to have phone service everywhere while investing way lower amounts of money in infrastructure, which is their big problem.
Maybe this could work in the same way. Poor countries import too much basic stuff because they have not enough stuff going on in their territory apart from farming.

 

[Paul98]

You don't have to just use metal, you can create a mold using a 3d printer and then use what you would like to make the piece you want. Or you could use that mold over and over so you don't have to print out each piece.

I can see printing organ scaffolding then using your own cells for creating a replacement organ. Mock up car pieces that can quickly be tested out and changed along with being light weight.

 

[kalrith]

If it comes to fruition, I think that 3D printing of organs is the most intriguing application:

http://www.dailytech.com/Human+Embryonic+Stem+Cells+Created+with+3D+Printing/article29839.htm

http://www.latimes.com/news/science...nter-self-assembling-20130404,0,6286611.story

 

[Moonbeam]

Tech from the 80s. Laser sintering

Right now with the work being done on plastics and polymers we might get higher strength material in a few years. Right now I wouldn't trust ABS plastic parts to hold any real load. But I could see a day when you could print a custom bracket for a shelf and trust it to hold.

I believe I just read somewhere that GE is using 3D printing to make jet engines. Let me see if I can find a link.

Yup: http://elitedaily.com/news/business/ge-3d-printing-parts-jet-engines/

 

[Sonikku]

To be fair, the words "ludicrous" and "absurd" were likely thrown around constantly among a thousand different ideas over the course of the 20th century that eventually became reality.

Just because we cannot wrap our minds around how it would work does necessarily mean it is impossible for such things to ever exist at one point in the future. The belief that something is impossible just because we do not see how it could happen is often a case of arrogance. Who knows what we will have in a century.

 

[smackababy]

To be fair, the words "ludicrous" and "absurd" were likely thrown around constantly among a thousand different ideas over the course of the 20th century that eventually became reality.

Just because we cannot wrap our minds around how it would work does necessarily mean it is impossible for such things to ever exist at one point in the future. The belief that something is impossible just because we do not see how it could happen is often a case of arrogance. Who knows what we will have in a century.

The thing is, we can wrap out minds around 3d printing organic food items. Unless we can somehow combine the raw atoms, the only way to 3d print a chicken sandwich, is to use chicken particles, bread particles, cheese particles, and anythings else you want on the sandwich. Or it will be a chicken "flavored" "sandwich" made up of some organic matter. The idea that we could make a device to fly wasn't as absurd because there were animals in nature that had already mastered flight. We just had to understand lift and propulsion and harness it in a way that was efficient enough to sustain said flight.

 

[JTsyo]

I believe I just read somewhere that GE is using 3D printing to make jet engines. Let me see if I can find a link.

Yup: http://elitedaily.com/news/business/ge-3d-printing-parts-jet-engines/

yea, less likely to get voids in the blades.

 

[smackababy]

yea, less likely to get voids in the blades.

If they are using it to make parts for aircrafts, I suspect the technology has come a lot farther than we speculated in this thread. The regulations for aircrafts are quite stringent and have to be executed with precision. I can't imagine GE wanted to get fined billions for a plane crash by the FAA.

 

[Moonbeam]

The thing is, we can wrap out minds around 3d printing organic food items. Unless we can somehow combine the raw atoms, the only way to 3d print a chicken sandwich, is to use chicken particles, bread particles, cheese particles, and anythings else you want on the sandwich. Or it will be a chicken "flavored" "sandwich" made up of some organic matter. The idea that we could make a device to fly wasn't as absurd because there were animals in nature that had already mastered flight. We just had to understand lift and propulsion and harness it in a way that was efficient enough to sustain said flight.

MIT's Digital Food Printer Creates Nutritious Meals

by Diane Pham, 01/20/10

filed under: Green Appliances, green gadgets, Green Kitchen, Green Products
sustainable design, green design, MIT, digital food printer, no waste, cooking, 3d printer, Cornucopia, well balanced meals

Here’s an interesting thought: What if eating greener and more sustainably meant printing your meals? Marcelo Coelho and Amit Zoran, a couple ingenious minds at MIT, have come up with a way to do just that. Hailed as ‘The Cornucopia’, this 3-D printer concept is a personal food factory that fuses the digital world with the realm of cooking by storing, precisely mixing, depositing, and cooking layers of ingredients with no waste.

MIT, digital food printer, no waste, cooking, 3d printer, Cornucopia, well balanced meals

Cornucopias’ printing process begins with an array of food canisters filled with the “cook’s” foods of choice. After a meal selection has been made using the device’s multi-touch translucent screen, users are able to see their meal being assembled while simultaneously manipulating real-time parameters, such as calories or carbohydrate content. Each ingredient is then piped into a mixer and then very precisely extruded, allowing for very exact and elaborate combinations of food.

Once each ingredient has been dropped, the food is then heated or cooled by Cornucopia’s chamber or via the heating and cooling tubes located on the printing head. In fact, the ability to hyper-localize heating and create rapid temperature changes also allows for the creation of meals with flavors and textures that would be impossible to replicate with present-day cooking methods.
===============

The scenario painted by the link the OP objected to was based on thoughts of what the future can hold given what the MIT machine may bring. It was not based on some fantastical notion I think the OP read into it, that food or drinks would be assembled from constituent atoms, etc. What is does is real and recipes for duplicating what it can do can be stored digitally and exchanged on line. Where this technology will go is wide open, in my opinion. It could be hype or find applications we can't imagine. Personally, I could see how such a technology, like sushi's capacity to get me to eat shit I wouldn't touch otherwise, might make insect protein palatable, a switch humanity will likely have to make. You can grow, as I understand it, tons and tons of meal worm protein in a small area by growing it vertically. Puffed meal worm juice that tastes like chocolate or yogurt might be something I could handle.

 

[Moonbeam]

If they are using it to make parts for aircrafts, I suspect the technology has come a lot farther than we speculated in this thread. The regulations for aircrafts are quite stringent and have to be executed with precision. I can't imagine GE wanted to get fined billions for a plane crash by the FAA.

Yes, but the 'hype' I read years ago was that additive manufacturing is the next industrial revolution and I think there's every chance it will be.

Take this for example, which is where, I now realize, I first saw the GE thingi.

From MIT Review:

"Think of the most frustrating, intractable, or simply annoying problems you can imagine. Now think about what technology is doing to fix them. That’s what we did in coming up with our annual list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies. We’re looking for technologies that we believe will expand the scope of human possibilities."

Here is one of them:

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/513716/additive-manufacturing/

 

[smackababy]

That is not really a 3d printer so much as a food processor. However, you need all the ingredients to have it make you food. This isn't something new. By the time we get this technology is reasonable prices and scales to be available for home use, we'd have super calorie dense, easy to eat rice cakes that provide the exact nutritional value we need for our body.

 

[lotus503]

How are you invested in it exactly? I feel very strongly about few technologies and 3D printing is one I really like. I also like driver-less cars.

private investment in an engineering shop that uses 3d printing, currently they do a lot of prototyping and fulfillment for 3d print designers.

 

[lotus503]

3D printed items are brittle pieces of junk... literally.
good for visualizing and prototyping, bbutnot good as commercial goods... or have I missed some quantum leaps in 3D printing tech.

as to 3D printing cheetos... um... 1st you have to make the "food" content. that is not going to be stored in a drum, and cheetoes are not plastic, wax, whattnot. Any food item to beprinted must be first "mixed in a liquid slurry form" before the nasty nasty synthetic final product would be printed.

i'll take a carrot instead.

3D printing with metals?... how is that possible (if at all).

they are using some nylon materials that are as strong as aluminum, its only a matter of time before the materials are as strong as other metal

 

[Moonbeam]

http://www.dailytech.com/NASA+Award...od+on+LongTerm+Space+Travels/article31598.htm

Some additional news on 3d food.

 

[uclaLabrat]

If it comes to fruition, I think that 3D printing of organs is the most intriguing application:

http://www.dailytech.com/Human+Embryonic+Stem+Cells+Created+with+3D+Printing/article29839.htm

http://www.latimes.com/news/science...nter-self-assembling-20130404,0,6286611.story

Organovo is working on liver tissue right now, they may have viable tissue already but I think they're a long way from functional organs

 

[colonelciller]

That actually is not a big deal -- powdered metal and a binder of some sort.

Of course, it's not the same as forged or cast metal, but it does have some uses.

would that find use as a conductive element rather than something providing rigidity or strength?

 

[colonelciller]

well well... i'm gonna have to eat crow and color myself impressed with 3D printing advancements

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/3D-printer-medicine-baby-airway-splint,news-17061.html

3D printers have been in the news a lot over the last few weeks, mostly thanks to the advent of 3D-printed guns and NASA's investment in 3D-printed food. Today brings a different word of a different kind of 3D-printed product.

According to an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, doctors from the University of Michigan used a 3D-printed airway splint to help a baby breathe. The NEMD says the patient was suffering from tracheobronchomalacia, which manifests with dynamic airway collapse and respiratory insufficiency and is apparently difficult to treat. The doctors custom-designed and custom-fabricated resorbable airway splint that was fabricated from polycaprolactone using a 3D-printer. The biodegradable polyester splint will prevent a collapsed airway while simultaneously allowing flexion, extension, and expansion with growth. According to the New England Medical Journal, they began taking the baby off mechanical ventilation after a week. Within three weeks, ventilator support was discontinued completely. After roughly three years, the splint will have been reabsorbed and the patient's trachea will be strong enough to not need any additional support.


This isn't the first medical use of 3D printing. In February of last year, Belgian and Dutch scientists at the University of Hasselt (Belgium) successfully replaced the lower jaw of an 83-year-old woman with a 3D printed model fashioned out of titanium. The surgery was done to treat a bad infection and the patient recovered much quicker from the implant surgery than she would have had she had a more traditional surgery.

 

[Harabec]

http://www.bikerumor.com/2013/05/20/charge-bikes-3d-printed-titanium-bike-parts-production-begins/

Yes, we're on our way to full-time Replicators

 

[Lithium381]

3d printing of keys . . . . .mmmmm they'll just be able to conjur up any key they need and get into your house. or just 3d print an rfid badge with the right magnetic field?

 

[SMOGZINN]

3d printing of keys . . . . .mmmmm they'll just be able to conjur up any key they need and get into your house. or just 3d print an rfid badge with the right magnetic field?

You need a 3D model to 3D print. So if they had a 3D model of the Key, then yes they could print one that would open a lock. Since most keys are fairly simple, maybe if you had a picture of the key you could create a 3D model from it that would be close enough to print working a copy, but with out some method of knowing what the key looks like you can't just print the right key to a lock.

As for the badge, you could print the badge no problem, and add a RFID chip but the chip would have to be programmed just like any new badge.

 

[Moonbeam]

This is pretty fun:

http://news.msn.com/science-technology/print-yourself-a-house

 

[chucky2]

3D printed organs and food are probably the most awesome things ever invented. For those needing a new organ(s), it is a literal lifesaver. If they can eventually make 3D printed food a reality to the level an average person will eat it, we can end the slaughter of millions of animals because they happen to be tasty. Obviously we'll have to wait decades for this to hit acceptable quality levels, but between 3D printing and genetic engineering (where perhaps we just grow new organs and food?) the future holds some really exciting possibilities...

Chuck