Breakthrough at Sandia may take 3D printing tech to next level
BY JOHN LEACOCK
JOURNAL STAFF REPORTER
What’s a SWOMP? It’s not something that needs to be drained in Washington. Rather, it’s an acronym describing an advance in an already advanced technology. That innovation at Albuquerque’s Sandia National Laboratories is set to bring changes in how models are created in
3D printing, improvements in the durability of material used to create them and faster
3D printing, according to lab officials who worked on the project.
3D printing is a process that uses machines to deposit layers of plastic, metal, concrete and other materials atop one another, eventually producing three-dimensional objects from the bottom up. The technology has been used to create a wide-range of products, from car parts to prosthetic limbs. There are also applications for aerospace, medical, automative, manufacturing and other industries. One aspect of
3D printing that has needed improvement is the actual strength of the objects made by
3D
printing. The Sandia team is working to change that. The new process includes using stronger nonmetallic materials.
The speed of
3D printing also needed a boost, and Sandia’s new process works five times faster than current
3D printing, according to the lab. “It opens up a whole new world of what you can build and what
3D materials can be used for,” said Samuel Leguizamon, materials scientist at Sandia. Leguizamon led the team that developed SWOMP, which stands for Selective Dual-Wavelength Olefin Metathesis
3D -Printing. Within that acronym lies the description of the new, revolutionary process developed at Sandia.
Like baking cookies
Simply put, it’s like baking cookies.
3D printing works by creating an object using a liquid resin. In the process, known as vat polymerization, an ulraviolet light cures and hardens resin, after which it’s lifted out in layers. However, polymer material can stick in the wrong places, ruining the object, or even stick to the vat. It’s akin to a cookie-baking problem. “After you bake the cookies, you have to let them cool,” said Leah Appelhans, a researcher working on the Sandia project. “If you were to try to peel the warm cookie off the cookie sheet, it’s squishy and it breaks apart. The same thing would happen with a
3D printer if you tried to quickly print each layer. Your work would get deformed.” The challenge became how to cool those “cookies” quicker.
The key was to combine ultraviolet and blue lights — and SWOMP was born out of that dual-wavelength use. “You are still printing layer by layer, but you are using a second wavelength of light to prevent polymerization at the bottom of the vat,” Leguizamon said. That means the product won’t get stuck to the bottom of the vat. “You can lift the cured polymer part more quickly.” The effect is to speed up the printing process significantly, Leguizamon said. Besides the cleaner cookie lift, the new process is also making
3D -printed materials stronger and more versatile. After all, acrylic-based objects, which were made in their previous
3D printing approach, aren’t the strongest materials, the lab says. “It’s really hard to use these materials in things like aircraft and space and aerospace and automotive; they are very harsh environments,” Sandia licensing executive Bob Sleeper said. That’s where better, stronger materials come in.
Learning how to 3D print
Brad Rashap teaches
3D design and printing in CNM Ingenuity’s Internet of Things Bootcamp. He sees positives in the new tech. Rashap, whose course is called the Internet of Things and Rapid Prototyping, calls
3D printing “a phenomenal prototyping tool” and points out the technology has become even more ubiquitous than many people realize. For example, it’s most likely used in your dental office, mainly to produce temporary crowns and other dental products that fit into patients’ mouths. That kind of technology can be improved by what Sandia is doing, Rashap surmises, so that dentists can go beyond just making temporary crowns and actually complete the entire product using advanced materials. “As the technology is continuing to mature, it will move more and more into mainstream manufacturing,” he said. The hope is that eventually it would be possible to
3D print almost anything. Rashap said there are a couple different approaches to
3D printing, as illustrated by the range of pricing for the technology. “There are several different forms of
3D printing — different methodologies. You can buy a
3D printer for a few hundred dollars now. It will come with a spool of plastic that gets melted and extruded,” he said. “The Sandia technology is slightly different in that … it uses a combination of laser light and some blue light to essentially solidify polymers, and the third methodology is similar to that but instead of using a liquid, you use kind of a powder, so in the liquid space, peeling away the layers is definitely the slow part of that process.”
The Sandia project, he said, “should make the
3D printing process faster for that liquid resin technology ... and there’s only a certain set of materials that can be used right now, and I believe the Sandia technology will expand the available materials for printing in the future.”
SA MUEL LE GUI ZAMON
SWOMP, or Selective Dual-Wavelength Olefin Metathesis 3D-Printing, uses two wavelengths of light simultaneously to change the way certain materials are 3D printed. COURTESY
Rashap encourages everyone whose interested in learning about this field to get involved. He emphasized that the CNM bootcamp has “students as young as 18 and as old as 81” and has been able to open doors to those who come from nontechnical backgrounds.
“The Internet of Things and Rapid Prototyping bootcamp … is a short 10-week program from start to finish, doesn’t have any prerequisites, you don’t need to know math or science and we’ve been very successful in taking individuals, ages 18 to 81, and helping them three months later be able to get into entry-level technician jobs at usually twice the salary they had before they came to the bootcamp.”
As far as the cost of the bootcamp, Rashap said students most likely would be covered by financial aid.
Marketing 3D printing innovation
To get the technology out into the marketplace, Sandia officials said they will consider licensing at least two issued patents and other patent applications for commercialization and research and development. Sandia is looking for partners in two areas: 1. commercial partners to license the technology for scaling it to the production floor, and 2. R& D partners to refine 3D printer capabilities and monumers (molecules that bond) for use in the fast 3D printing press.
“The new ability to 3D print this high value plastic on demand and outside the injection molding process opens new opportunities to replace inferior 3D printed plastic and some metal machined parts, depending on the application,” said Sandia licensing expert Bob Sleeper. “This material can also now be quickly 3D printed for use in new complex and harsh environments such as automotive, rockets, engines batteries, and possibly even in fusion applications.”
BY CRAI G FRIT Z / SANDIA NATIONAL LA BORATORIES
PRINTING from page Z8 to
Z9
Samuel Leguizamon watches as Alex Commisso stretches 3D material that they printed at Sandia National Laboratories using Selective Dual-Wavelength Olefin Metathesis 3D-Printing, or SWOMP. PHOTO
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