Printing Processes
Printing technology has been extensively investigated, with the majority of that investigation historically based upon applications to the two-dimensional printing industry. Recently, however, it has spread to numerous new application areas, including ele
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Printing Processes
Printing technology has been extensively investigated, with the majority of that investigation historically based upon applications to the two-dimensional printing industry. Recently, however, it has spread to numerous new application areas, including electronics packaging, optics, and additive manufacturing. Some of these applications, in fact, have literally taken the technology into a new dimension. The employment of printing technologies in the creation of three-dimensional products has quickly become an extremely promising manufacturing practice, both widely studied and increasingly widely used. This chapter will summarize the printing achievements made in the additive manufacturing industry and in academia. The development of printing as a process to fabricate 3D parts is summarized, followed by a survey of commercial polymer printing machines. Both direct part printing and binder printing technologies are introduced. Direct printing refers to processes where all of the part material is dispensed from a print head, while binder printing refers to a broad class of processes where binder or other additive is printed onto a powder bed which forms the bulk of the part. Some of the technical challenges of printing are introduced; material development for printing polymers, metals, and ceramics is investigated in some detail. From the topic of pure printing technologies, we move to the three-dimensional binder printing process, where binder is printed into a powder bed to form a part.
7.1
Evolution of Printing as an Additive Manufacturing Process
Two-dimensional inkjet printing has been in existence since the 1960s, used for decades as a method of printing documents and images from computers and other digital devices. Inkjet printing is now widely used in the desktop printing industry, commercialized by companies such as HP and Canon. Le [1] provides a thorough review of the historical development of the inkjet printing industry. I. Gibson, D.W. Rosen, and B. Stucker, Additive Manufacturing Technologies, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-1120-9_7, # Springer ScienceþBusiness Media, LLC 2010
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7.1.1
7 Printing Processes
Historical Development of 3D Printing
Printing as a three-dimensional building method was first demonstrated in the 1980s with patents related to the development of Ballistic Particle Manufacturing, which involved simple deposition of “particles” of material onto an article [2]. The first commercially successful technology was the ModelMaker from Sanders Prototype (now Solidscape), introduced in 1994, which printed a basic wax material that was heated to liquid state [3]. In 1996, 3D Systems joined the competition with the introduction of the Actua 2100, another wax-based printing machine. The Actua was revised in 1999 and marketed as the ThermoJet [3]. In 2001, Sanders Design International briefly entered the market with its Rapid ToolMaker, but was quickly restrained due to intellectual property conflicts with Solidscape [3]. It is notable that all of these members of the f
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