What Is 3D Printing And How Does It Work?

The 3D printer is a kind of machine of rapid prototyping technology. It is a kind of digital model file as the foundation, using powdered metal or plastic and other bondable materials to construct objects by printing layer by layer. At the time, the software completes a series of digital slices through computer-aided design (CAD) and transmits the slice information to a 3D printer, which stacks successive thin layers until a solid object is formed. The biggest difference between a 3D printer and a traditional printer is that the "ink" it uses is a real raw material.

The working principle of a 3D printer is basically the same as that of a traditional printer. They are composed of control components, mechanical components, print heads, consumables, and media. The printing principles are the same.

The 3D printer mainly designs a complete three-dimensional model on the computer before printing, and then prints it out. There are many forms of stacking thin layers used in 3D printing. Commonly used 3D printers use Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM). Fused accumulation is also known as fuse accumulation. It is a process of heating and ablating filamentous hot-melt materials and extruding them through a nozzle with a fine nozzle. After the hot melt material is melted, it is ejected from the nozzle and piled on the panel or the previous layer of solidified material. After the temperature is lower than the solidification temperature, it begins to solidify, and the final product is formed through the accumulation of layers of materials.

Among 3D printing technologies, FDM has the simplest mechanical structure, simplest design, and the lowest production cost, protection cost, and material cost. Therefore, it is also the most used technology in-home desktop 3D printers. The work process is first modeled by computer modeling software, if you have a ready-made model, such as animal models, characters or miniature constructions, etc. The standard file format for collaboration between design software and printer is the STL file format. An STL file uses triangular faces to approximate the appearance of an object. The smaller the triangle, the higher the resolution of the resulting surface. Then copy it to the 3D printer via the SD card, or directly connect the computer and the 3D printer with a USB cable, and after setting up the print, the printer can print them out. In the printing process, the printer reads the cross-sectional information in the file, ablates the cross-sections with hot-melt materials, and prints these cross-sections layer by layer, and then creates an entity.

The characteristic of this technology is that it can create objects of almost any shape. The thickness of the cross-section printed by the printer (that is, the Z-axis direction) and the resolution in the plane direction, that is, the X-axis-Y-axis direction is calculated in dpi (pixels per inch) or micrometers. The general thickness is 100 microns, or 0.1 mm, and some printers can print a layer as thin as 16 microns. The plane direction can print out the resolution near the laser printer. The diameter of the printed "ink drop" is generally 50 to 100 microns. It usually takes several hours to several days to make a model using traditional methods, depending on the scale and the degree of clutter. The use of three-dimensional printing technology can shorten the time to several hours, of course, it is determined by the function of the printer and the scale and degree of the clutter of the model.

Traditional manufacturing techniques such as injection molding can produce polymer products at a lower cost, while three-dimensional printing technology can produce a relatively small number of products in a faster, more flexible, and lower-cost method. A desktop-scale 3D printer can meet the needs of designers or concept development teams to make models.