There’s a new take on ceramic 3D printer design — from pottery.
UK-based AM engineer Arthur Prior has designed and built a new type of ceramic 3D printer, inspired by traditional pottery techniques.
In traditional pottery, a wheel spins a lump of clay, where it is shaped by hand into the desired geometry. Typically, vases and containers are produced in this way due to their cylindrical shapes.
Previous ceramic 3D printers tend to fall into two categories:
- A pressure system that extrudes clay through a toolhead that uses typical 3D printer motion systems
- A binder jet system produces a green part that must undergo debinding and sintering steps
The new ceramic design involves mixing the first approach with pottery techniques. Prior explains in a LinkedIn post:
”What do you get when you cross a 3D printer with a pottery wheel?
When my partner started taking pottery classes, we both got a little obsessed. But instead of learning to throw, I went down a different rabbit hole … building a ceramic printer.
Since then, I’ve spent (probably too much) time designing a second prototype. This has been a fun side project!”
The concept is to spin the build plate, just like a pottery wheel. This allows for very rapid extrusion, as you can see in this video:
Incredibly, this vase was printed in less than three minutes. That’s much faster than typical ceramic extrusion systems, and far faster than polymer FFF prints.
The completed print would then be fired to complete the work.
The raw speed of this system is amazing, but it comes with a rather challenging constraint: all prints must be cylindrical. This is as if your 3D print slicer is permanently set to “vase mode”. However, many ceramic objects take that form, so it could still be extremely useful.
It seems that this unnamed device is merely an experimental side project, so we are not likely to see it as a commercial project. That could only happen if the constraints mentioned above do not shrink the potential market.
I did wonder whether this style of extrusion 3D printing could be done with FFF technology. Spinning build plates have been used with inkjet 3D printing. This has been commercially used with the AMpolar i2, which uses their unusual High Speed Rotative process.
That machine uses inkjets to rapidly deposit droplets of resin on the spinning plate. The technology is now owned by 3D Systems, but we haven’t heard much about it since the acquisition in 2022.
There was one attempt at FFF extrusion with a rotating build plate, which I saw way back in 2015, ten years ago. The system, by Polar3D, didn’t attempt high speed through rotation, but instead used the rotation as an alternative motion system.
Did it work? Nope, the company seems to be selling a cloud-based management system for 3D printing, and the rotating bed printer has disappeared.
Let’s hope that Prior’s new ceramic system has more life.
Via LinkedIn
