3-Dimensional Printing

I've been hearing and reading about a topic that brings me smack-dab into the reason I started this blog.  I love to learn about new things, to mull over ideas, new and old.  Anything that stretches and challenges the mind.

We are by now accustomed to seeing 3D images, even though they really aren't 3D.  They may look as though they have depth, but that's just an illusion.  No matter how real they look, they are still just 3-dimensional representations on a 2-dimensional medium.

Here is a 3D picture of the St. Louis Arch.  It's really two slightly offset 2-dimensional images.  The picture looks pretty weird unless you put on the special pair of glasses to merge the images so that your brain interprets it as one image with the illusion of depth.









Photographs, no matter how well they capture a beautiful nature scene, are always flat on the page.  And a printer--at least the ones most of us have ever encountered--can only put ink down on a flat piece of paper.

That, however, is no longer true.  We now have 3-D printers.  Maybe you already knew that, but it seems that I am just waking up to that fact, even though my research tells me that they have been around for a couple of decades.  At first, of course, they were very expensive and limited in their use--mostly for prototype models in manufacturing applications.  Now, however, we probably have many products in our daily lives that are made directly from printers.  These are only a couple of the thousands of such items.

Cell phone case

Toy car

A computerized model with all dimensions (length, width, depth) is sent to the printer, which deposits ultra-thin layers of powder onto a surface, one on top of another, until the final product is made.  The powder is held together using a binding liquid that's deposited during printing.

And such items as these are only the tip of the iceberg.  What is really mind-boggling is the way 3D printing is becoming indispensable in the medical field. 

Applications in dentistry are becoming more widespread.  Crowns, bridges, and implants can now be made from a 3D printer right in the dentist's office.  No more living with a temporary crown--it can be scanned, manufactured, and put in your mouth all in the same visit!

The most amazing related medical story I have come across was done in June, 2011, in the Netherlands.
An 83-year-old woman had such a terrible infection in her lower jaw (mandible) that it had to be surgically removed.  Her age precluded the trauma of complex reconstructive surgery that would give her a new mandible, so the doctors decided to try something new: a 3D printed implant.

The project required a team of researchers and designers, as well as a company to handle the production.  But the actual printing took only a few hours.  A laser beam melted thin layers of titanium powder, one on top of the other.  Thousands of layers were necessary to build the jawbone (33 layers = l mm of height).  The printed jaw then got a bioceramic coating and was attached to the woman in about four hours.  She was talking and swallowing within a day.

This all sounds pretty amazing to me!

Next Post to Come:  FOOD PRINTING