3D printers have made their way into many fields. Today the applications of 3D printers hold no bounds. If you have seen the movie “skyfall” then you saw one application of the printer. The production crew instead of blowing the Aston Martin DB5 in the end, made a 1:3 scale model of the car and blew that up into pieces. Here are few other applications of 3D printers.
In the early days of 3D printing, the things that came out were mostly design prototypes. However, with advancements in technology more accurate and delicate things came into existence. One of those things is possibly personalized clothing. The printing team at shapeways printed nylon clothing. The process works on an algorithm that adjusts based on curvature of the body. If the curve is larger the circles get smaller, more like a body scan so the final product perfectly fits the client.
Making a guitar by conventional methods is a subtractive process. What that means is that in order to make a guitar, let’s say a wooden one, one has to start with a chunk of wood and carve the wood to make the desired part of the instrument. The case however is quite different with the printing process. It builds the thing layer by layer into the required shape with a material that later turn hard. This way perfection is likely to be achieved and since it is controlled by a computer, there is no limit to different models and shape that can be thought up and then made.
According to Behrokh Khoshnevis, an engineering professor at the University of Southern California, full –sized houses can be printed out in 20 hours with all the plumbing and electrical wiring integrated in the print. This would imply that whole neighborhoods could be constructed and made ready in a matter of months. As always, since it’s the computer that control the printing, different designs could be printed easily thus eliminating the homogeneity of neighborhoods. Not to mention its application as a quick relief in case of a natural disaster.