3DPrinting

Was reading about this recently for the industry: A team of European researchers has come up with a game-changing 3D printing method that uses holography to make printing faster and more efficient. Their technique, called HoloVAM, is an upgrade to Tomographic Volumetric Additive Manufacturing (TVAM), but instead of regular light projections, it uses a 3D hologram. This tweak makes the process way more efficient, speeding up printing times to just a few seconds while improving accuracy.

The team behind this breakthrough comes from Switzerland’s EPFL Laboratory of Applied Photonic Devices and the University of Southern Denmark’s Centre for Photonics Engineering. Their official research has been published in Nature Communications, showcasing how even complex 3D images - like the 3D image in their tests - can now be printed at incredible speeds.

Also that the most 3D printed benchy thing was made open source recently too. Very powerful stuff if it's in the hands of more people, and especially those who need it can put it to good use.

Thanks for the share. That's interesting and I understand the niche needs for developping countries. Especially when you don't have a strong control on what you get as pipes.

What I find interesting is the way they choose to make it watertight : "100% infill was leveraged to ensure all components were watertight, while extrusion flow was increased by 5-15% to prevent layer gaps."

I have doubts.

I live in a city where water leaks contribute to something like 40% of supplied potable water ‘consumption’.

Why so much? Because the pipes are old, shit, and underground. it costs a load of money to dig that shit up.

A $5 (or even $500) brass fitting that will last 50+ years is nothing when you’ve spent $1000s doing traffic management, digging up a road, replacing some pipe, and putting it all back again.

What are you going to trust? A $5 lump of solid of brass, or a $0.3 lump of plastic, made by squeezing 0.2mm layers of plastic string on top of each other, using a system whose bonding strength can be drastically affected by ambient and absorbed humidity, temperature, speed, airflow, and a whole load of other variables.

I would love some extra micro plastics in my water.

3D Printed pipe fittings have to be one of the worst 3D printing applications I've ever heard of. We use metal fittings for a reason.

The researchers believe using a parametric-driven method for local, on-demand 3D printing of customized fittings will unlock more efficient water management.

there's a whole lot of buzzwords there. if the current system can't be fixed becuse there's no parts (pipe fitting, and pipes,) to replace the leaky bits, then how exactly do you expect them to source a 3 d printer and filament? More to the point... FDM prints themselves are prone to leaking, from a myriad of issues.

I don't think 3d printing the pipe fittings is the answer here.

that said, it's cool and fun all the same.

If these weren't made using the FDM process, they could be quite useful; but as-is the FDM process is weak along the Z axis, and these kinds of fittings aren't going to withstand a lifetime of abuse -- not only that, the kinds of plastics we're printing with aren't really regulated to any kind of degree, so depending on what kind of things are in the water, you could just be pumping large amounts of microplastics into your system by using something like this.

It's a great avenue for research, but we need more robust methods of printing for something like this.