Untitled. Can HP Make 3-D Printing into a Mass Manufacturing Technique? The tech giant says its new $130,000 printers will produce plastic parts quickly and inexpensively. Despite the flexibility of 3-D printing, it still cannot compete with conventional injection molding for making large volumes of high-strength plastic parts. Hewlett-Packard says its new printing technology will change that. Today HP will begin taking orders for systems that print parts in a process it calls Jet Fusion. The company will start shipping the printers, which start at $130,000, in October.
It also announced several industrial partners, including BMW and Nike. Jet Fusion is best compared to laser sintering, in which a laser is used to heat granules of polymer powder and fuse them to build objects layer by layer. Laser sintering can make very strong parts, but it is relatively slow because it relies on a point laser. HP says its technology is up to 10 times faster than laser sintering. Robot Spiders Weave Products from Plastic in a New Spin on 3-D Printing.
Siemens is testing teams of creepy-crawly 3-D-printing robots. Their descendants might make manufacturing lines far more efficient. If you’re afraid of spiders, then you might find Siemens’s vision for future manufacturing lines a bit alarming. In a lab in Princeton, New Jersey, the company’s researchers are testing spider-like robots that extrude not silk but plastic, thanks to portable 3-D printers. The robots can work together autonomously to create simple objects. The work is at an early stage, but it hints at where manufacturing may be headed, thanks to more sophisticated robot hardware, smarter control software, and new ways of forming components using 3-D printing. Unlike a conventional robotic production line, which has to be carefully reconfigured for each new product, a team of mobile manufacturing bots would simply be given the latest design and left to go to work. The robots are equipped with 3-D cameras for mapping their surroundings. Here Comes 4-D Printing--and It's Pretty Mind-Blowing.
Research. It Will Be Awesome if They Don't Screw it Up: 3D Printing.