Excuse me, while I `print' my dentures
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Lay users may soon enjoy the ability to create solid objects
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LAYER BY LAYER: Desktop Factory's 3D printer and some plastic parts created using it.
I JUST dropped my mobile phone and the outer casing has broken. What do I do?
Probably go to the suppliers and check if they can encase my phone in a new body — not a cheap or easy task. The new casing costs almost a fourth of the price of the phone.
Exact replacement
Your spectacle frame has cracked. It is difficult to find the exact replacement, which will take the place of the same costly and well-worn pair of glasses.
You are forced to compromise and order the nearest fit. These are the scenarios of yesterday and today. Now take a peek at tomorrow — not sometime in the distant future, but later this year:
You `capture' the shape of an object — like a mobile phone case or a spectacle frame — using special software; then you turn on your 3-D printer, which looks exactly like your normal PC printer, only slightly larger.
You ensure that its `printing' medium — not ink in a cartridge but one filled with finely powdered plastic — is adequate; you press `print' on your PC — and a new phone case or whatever, is created slowly, layer by layer, in front of your eyes. It dries in seconds and is ready to use — maybe after some sand papering to smooth the edges.
Congratulations, you have entered the era of three-dimensional printing.
Desktop Factory (www.desktopfactory.com) , a spin-off from the U.S.-based IdeaLab, promises that by end 2007, it will offer a consumer model of its 3-D printer for under $ 5,000 (Rs 2.25 lakhs). IdeaLab's technology makes use of a halogen lamp to heat powdered plastic that adheres to a roller and a focused laser beam to fuse it, to form a one dimensional image of the object required.
Thus far the process is very similar to the way an image is fused in a laser printer. The `image' is rolled on to a plate and prints as a layer, much as it would on paper in a normal printer.
Now is where 2-D becomes 3-D. The process is repeated again and again, depositing more layers, stacking one on top of another, in the 3rd dimension, to form the solid object. Heat is applied again to fuse all the layers into a single object.
Remember how one made paper mache items in school, by pasting layers of soaked and gummed paper on a mould to create bowls and vases?
This is exactly the same idea in operation!
Rapid prototypers
3-D printers are not something new. They have been used by large design and manufacturing agencies to try out new equipment parts at the design stage before freezing the drawings for mass manufacture.
Such machines were known as rapid prototypers.But they were pricey tools, their costs averaging Rs 50 lakhs.
Use and throw
But the ability to rapidly turn out simple solid shapes has a compelling attraction for lay consumers these days, in a `use and throw' era when the cost of replacing a minor part of many common instruments is comparable to the cost of replacing the entire unit.
IdeaLab is not the only player in this arena — though it is probably the first to try and create a product for lay users rather than manufacturing agencies.
Dr. Adrian Bowyer, a Senior Lecturer in mechanical engineering at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom, invented RepRap (short for Replicating Rapid prototype) a technology that harnesses the same fused deposition method harnessed by IdeaLab — only he optimised it so that an object could replicate itself.
Technology release
He has promised to release the technology under the GNU Open General Licence adopted by most Open Software users. (details at www.reprap.org ), so that others can create a machine for around $ 400 ( Rs 18,000) in materials.
A separate initiative in 3-D prototype printing that is aimed at the larger lay market is Fab@home (www.fabathome.org) .
Another exciting possibility is being explored by bio technologists: Why not create organs and body parts by using layers of human cells, bonding them with a gel-like medium to create 3-D structures.
Will the day come when we can say: I need another heart valve or a new set of dentures; let me go down to the bio-print shop and have one made?
Nothing impossible
Meanwhile industry watchers say, the price of basic 3-D printers will fall to less than $ 1,000 (Rs 45,000) within five years — which is what your average laser jet printer costs today. `Science sneaks up' was the title
The New York Times gave to its editorial on the recent exciting announcements in3-D printing. This is one sneaky surprise we can all hope will hit us, sooner rather than later.
ANAND PARTHASARATHY
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