3D printing: the materials used for 3D printing

3D printing was developed in the early 1980s, but has seen tremendous growth over the last 10 years. It has now become one of the fastest growing areas in the tech industry and is revolutionizing manufacturing spanning every possible industry. The 3D printing business is now a multi-billion dollar industry and is likely to continue to grow at an exponential rate.

3D printing is a fairly simple process conceptually, printers work by printing your chosen material in layers on top of each other, with each layer set before the next step of the printer.

3D printers have been used to print all kinds of materials, from cheap, normal materials to things you’d expect to read about in a science fiction book.

For the consumer market, plastics are used exclusively because the materials are cheap to buy, but more importantly, the technology required to print plastic is relatively simple and inexpensive.

Low-cost 3D printers that use plastic tend to use fused filament fabrication (FFF). This is basically a process where a plastic cord is heated to become flexible and then fed through the plastic layering machine. Machines generally use one of the following plastics

PLA (Polylactic Acid) – PLA is probably the easiest material to work with when you start 3D printing. It is an environmentally friendly material that is very safe to use as it is a biodegradable thermoplastic that has been derived from renewable resources such as corn starch and sugar cane. This is a plastic similar to that used in compostable bags that biodegrades safely compared to the more traditional plastics used in polyethylene bags.

ABS (Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene): ABS is considered to be the second easiest material to work with when starting 3D printing. It is very safe, strong and widely used for things like car bumpers and Lego (the children’s toy).

PVA (Polyvinyl Alcohol Plastic) – PVA plastic which is quite different than PVA glue (don’t try to put PVA glue in your 3D printer, it definitely won’t work). The popular MakerBot Replicator 2 printers use PVA plastic.

Plastics are widely used at all levels, from the consumer to companies prototyping new products. However, in the business market, there is a high demand for metal 3D printing. Some printers may use powdered material which is then heated to create a solid. This method is usually direct metal laser sintering (DMLS) and this particular technique is the reason we don’t see consumer metal 3D printing. DMLS requires a lot of heat and expensive giant printers to sinter the material, and while 3D printing a metal object can be expensive compared to mass production, it’s incredibly cost effective for complex and expensive projects. A good example of DMLS-based 3D printing is GE Aviation, which uses it to produce 35,000 fuel injectors for its LEAP jet engine.

The use of boring materials like metal is almost archaic in the world of 3D printing now; some companies now do 3D bioprinting, which is the process of creating patterns of cells in a confined space using 3D printing technologies, where the function and viability of the cells are preserved within the printed construct. These 3D bioprinters have the ability to print skin tissue, heart tissue, and blood vessels among other basic tissues that could be suitable for surgical therapy and transplantation.