Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory engineer Bryan Moran has created a printer that
projects an image
onto a liquid resin that hardens when hit by light in order to create 3D
objects.
Photo by Julie
Russell/LLNL
(December 13, 2015) Lawrence
Livermore Lab engineer Bryan Moran wasn’t necessarily looking to improve on 3D
printing technology when he moved over to Additive Manufacturing three years
ago, but he may have done just that.
Moran’s creation, a new take on a process called projection
micro-stereolithography, which uses UV light to create 3D objects, won him a
coveted R&D 100 award in Las Vegas on Nov. 13.
“It’s a leap forward because it’s combining two existing
techniques in a unique way,” Moran said. “It’s enabling things that you just
wouldn’t have thought of because it wasn’t practical before.”
Simply put, Moran’s printer, called the Large Area
Projection Micro-Stereolithography (LAPuSL), projects an image onto a liquid
resin that hardens when hit by light, to create 3D objects. Because his machine
combines the extraordinary detail (resolution on the order of micrometers)
inherent to direct light processors with high speed and a larger scan area, it
gives operators the ability to make larger and more complex objects at higher
speed. This enables the production of large components with fine features such
as micro-architected materials with overall sizes around 10 centimeters,
containing individual features in the micrometer range.
The machine combines the extraordinary detail (resolution on
the order of micrometers) inherent to Direct Light Processors with high speed
and a larger scan area, to make larger, more complex objects at higher speeds.
“Irritation is the mother of invention, and people were
annoyed that they couldn’t make things bigger yet maintain small feature sizes
(using projection micro-stereo lithography),” Moran said. “I did the research
and the math and figured out how to make it work. It’s the combination of the
projector with the scanning of a detailed image. You can easily cover a much larger
area with the same level of detail as that contained in one exposure of the
projector. The advantage is also in the speed. It’s a lot faster.”