What is 3D printing?
Three-dimensional (or 3D) printing is now the standard in the education, health care, architectural, graphic design, and arts industries. 3D Printing provides exceptional full-color communication with a full 24-bit palette, in business-quality resolution. Every artist, engineer, and student will have a leg-up in the world of technological communication, if they better understand the process of 3D Printing.
Leg Bed Frame
HOW DOES 3D-PRINTING WORK?
3D printing creates "physical prototypes" of an engineered design, in mere hours. In the business industry, prototypes allow the customer to be confronted with a tangible object representing a future product.
This tangible, tactile model can be held in the palm of your hand, promoting hand-on learning, and design innovation. 3D Printers use the most vibrant colors available with access to 5 different print heads. The printer size is 1200 cubic inches, the largest printer size on the market. ZPrinters are a popular 3D printing model, used universally by engineers, students, architects, and educators. These printers work from a variety of CAD (computer-aided design) software packages, including SolidWorks and PRO/engineer. The printers accept all major 3D file formats including:.stl,.wrl,.ply, and.sfx.
Once a solid file is created with the software, it can be exported from the 3D modeling package. Users can then open the file in ZPrint,™ a popular interface for 3D printers. The function slices the file into digital cross-sections, layer-by-layer, creating a 2D image. Users can can then edit their re-design, re-orient, or change it's color scheme. When a user is ready to print, the user implements the software to send the 2D image to the 3D printer through a standard network. This entire engineering process should only take about 10 minutes.
Once the file is printing, a typical 3D printer generates the layers by using standard ink-jet heads. The printer deposits a liquid binder onto thin layers of powder. The 3D print heads move over an evenly distributed bed of powder, printing the 2D data that was sent. This process creates a 3D object, layer-by-layer, vertically from the bottom, up. When process is completed, which takes about an hour, the 3D object will be covered with a layer of loose powder, which is simple to remove. All unused material is able to be recycled, thus making the process fast, clean, and efficient. What you have left is an innovative three-dimensional tool, used in design, architecture, business, and education.