Carbon’s 3D printer uses light to chemically grow an object out of liquid. We visited their facilities to see it in action and learn more about their lattice technology used for developing running shoes and football helmets.
[Music] We’re actually inspired by the Terminator 2 video to 1000 and it that Idea of basically the idea that the mass For the object could come to the liquid Underneath it Carbon is revolutionising how people Design products and we’ve cracked the Code on how to make polymeric products At scale and therefore unleashing the Power of digital manufacturing digital Design and all the opportunities that That has to make the unmei Keable and Have people’s dreams on what they want To design come to come to fruition so we Figured out a chemical way to maintain That liquid liquid interface and still Grow an object and we invented a very Special window that is not only Optically transparent but it’s also Permeable to oxygen an oxygen and light Work and polar opposite ways to allow us To take the liquid underneath it like The puddle and had that become the mass For the object that’s growing it allows You to go really fast and that opens up The opportunity for durable materials That can make n use parts while you Create these designs what you get out of The printer is the final product for us In traditional 3d printing a lot of it Is prototyping and also the challenge That you have with traditional 3d Printing is the inability to scale 3d
Printing has been around for 25 years or So and it’s been derived from a Mechanical engineering culture which was Really layer by layer very precisely Doing one layer at a time as chemists we Came up with a chemical approach That allows us to grow parts so that’s In a whole different ballgame it’s a Fundamentally different approach for Doing the process of building and Creating these parts and historically It’s been developed in the past so if You think about when you’re designing And building a car or a medical device Or running shoe or a football helmet you Need lots of different materials and so Polymers is what we do you need Properties of a wide variety in order to Make functional end products so we’ve Actually developed a range of properties A range of materials a range of Residents that have the properties that Actually are able to be final parts Mechanical engineers have been taunting Everybody for decades about the value of A lattice lattice you think about Building bridges and building buildings Where every strut is a part and you can Easily imagine doing that but when you Make a thing like a running shoe Something like this where you have a Wide range of struts or a football Helmet where there’s a hundred and forty Thousand different struts that’s unmei
Keable using traditional manufacturing And therefore this whole branch of Science whole branch of material science Has not been accessible commercially Because you couldn’t really scale it up Or make it and the power of this this Lattice structure is for example in the Adidas 4d shoes it returns energy to the Runner Whereas here with the Radel helmet it Actually dissipates energy so improves Impact absorption and player protection Different types of lattice doing Different things all around controlled Energy we then build the software tools To take advantage of the print ability Of what we can make and our resins so we Now have cloud-based computing finite Element analysis conformal lattices that Allow designers to design what they want And then we can populate a primitive CAD Drawing with a wide range of lattices And the user can specify what mechanical Properties they need in different Regions and we can automate this in a Cloud and it really integrates design With manufacturability with n use Function in ways that no one’s ever seen That come together quite like it does Today we’ve just launched an initiative Working on a hundred percent recyclable Resin for the dental space aligners that Are made are typically made with dental Models and those plastics traditionally
Are just dumped in landfills so what our Amazing materials team has been working On is a new process that allows once Those models have been made we can Pulverize them into powder convert that Into a next generation of liquid resin That we could use to make other products So we decided to go with a subscription Model first of all that enables Cloud-based computing and all the over Air software upgrades but more Importantly in future proofs a customer From obsolescence for our small printer It’s about seventy thousand dollars a Year for our large printer it’s at least Twice that digital’s impacted lots of Different sectors of the economy but Manufacturing has really not been tapped Because no one’s been able to scale a Fabrication technique digitally going Forward and that’s what we break through [Music]
