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Objects made with 3D printing can be lighter, stronger and more complex than those produced with traditional manufacturing methods. However, several technical problems must be overcome before 3D printing turns the production of most devices.
Commercially available printers generally only offer high speed, high precision or high quality materials. They rarely offer all three, which limits their usefulness as a manufacturing tool. Today, 3D printing is mainly used for prototyping and low volume production of specialized parts.
Now Inkbit, a MIT start-up, strives to bring all the benefits of 3D printing to a multitude of never-printed products – and targets volumes that would radically disrupt production processes in a variety of ways. industries.
The company does this by combining its multi-material, inkjet 3D printer with automatic vision and learning systems. The vision system exhaustively badyzes each layer of the object when printed to correct errors in real time, while the machine learning system uses this information to predict the deformation behavior of materials and create finished products. more precise.
"The company was born from the idea of providing a 3D printer with eyes and brains," says Inkbit co-founder and CEO, Davide Marini, PhD '03.
This idea opens up a whole range of applications for the Inkbit machine. The company says it can print more flexible documents with much more precision than other printers. If an object, including a computer chip or other electronic component, is placed on the print area, the machine can accurately print the documents that surround it. And when an object is completed, the machine retains a digital replica that can be used for quality badurance.
Inkbit is still a start-up company. He currently owns a production quality operational printer. But she will start selling print products later this year, starting with a pilot project with Johnson and Johnson, before selling her printers next year. While Inkbit can take advantage of the current interest of companies that sell medical devices, consumer products and automotive components, its machines will play a leading role in the production in many multi-billion dollar markets over the years. next years, dental aligners to industrial devices. tools and masks of sleep apnea.
"Everyone knows that the benefits of 3D printing are huge," says Marini. "But most people have trouble adopting it. Technology is not there yet. Our machine is the first to learn the properties of a material and predict its behavior. I think it will be transformative, because it will allow anyone to move from an idea to a product that can be used extremely quickly. This opens up business opportunities for everyone.
A printer with potential
Some of the most difficult materials to print today are also the most commonly used in today's manufacturing processes. This includes rubber-like materials such as silicone and high temperature materials such as epoxy, which are often used to insulate electronic components and in various consumer, health and industrial products.
These media are generally difficult to print, resulting in uneven distribution and failures in the printing process such as clogging. They also tend to contract or round off over time. Wojciech Matusik, co-founder of Inkbit, Associate Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Javier Ramos BS '12 SM & # 14; Wenshou Wang and Kiril Vidimče SM & # 14; have been working for years on these issues within Matusik's Computational Fabrications group within the group. Laboratory of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (CSAIL).
In 2015, the co-founders were part of a group of researchers who created a precise and relatively inexpensive 3D printer, capable of simultaneously printing a record 10 media using artificial vision. This feat attracted the attention of many large companies interested in moving from production to 3D printing, and then the following year, the four engineers received help from the Deshpande Center for market their idea of badociating industrial vision with 3D printing.
At MIT, the Matusik research group used a simple 3D scanner to track the progress of their machine. For the first Inkbit printer, the founders wanted to dramatically improve the "eyes" of their machine. They decided to use an optical coherence tomography (OCT) scanner, which uses long wavelengths of light to see through the surface of materials and scan layers of materials at a resolution corresponding to the fraction of the width of a human hair.
Ophthalmologists traditionally using OCT scanners only to look under the surface of patients' eyes, the only ones available were far too slow to scan each layer of a 3D printed part. The describes, and builds a custom OCT scanner, he says, is 100 times faster than all the rest of the market.
When a layer is printed and scanned, the company's proprietary machine vision and learning systems automatically correct errors in real time and proactively compensate for deformation and shrinkage behavior of unstable material. These processes further expand the range of media with which the company can print by removing rollers and scrapers used by other printers to ensure accuracy, which tends to get stuck when They are used with media that are difficult to print.
The system is designed to allow users to prototype and build new objects on the same machine. Inkbit's current industrial printer has 16 printheads to create multi-material parts and a print block large enough to produce hundreds of thousands of fist-sized products each year (or a smaller number of larger products). The non-contact inkjet design of the machine means that increasing the size of later iterations will be as simple as enlarging the print block.
"Previously, people could make prototypes with multi-material printers, but they could not really make the final parts," says Matusik, noting that post-processing of Inkbit parts can be fully automated. "It's something that is not possible with other manufacturing methods."
The Inkbit 3D printer can produce multi-material objects (such as the pinch valve shown above) at high volume. Courtesy of Inkbit
The new capabilities of the Inkbit machine mean that some of the materials that the founders want to print with are not available. The company has therefore created some of its own chemicals to push the performance of their products to the limit. An exclusive system for mixing two materials just before printing will be available on Inkbit printers delivered next year. The two-part chemistry mixing system will allow the company to print a wider range of technical grade materials.
Johnson and Johnson, strategic partner of Inkbit, is in the process of acquiring one of the first printers. The MIT Startup Exchange Accelerator (STEX25) has also helped to expose Inkbit to large companies such as Amgen, Asics, BAE Systems, Bosch, Chanel, Lockheed Martin, Medtronic, Novartis, and others.
Today, the founders spend much of their time forming product design teams that have never been able to 3D print their products – not to mention incorporating them. from electronic components to 3D printed parts.
Designers and inventors may have to wait a while before taking full advantage of the possibilities offered by integrated multi-material 3D printing. But for now, Inkbit strives to ensure that when this future comes, the most imaginative people will have a machine to work with.
"Some are so ahead of their time," says Matusik. "I think it will be really fascinating to see how people will use it for finished products."
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