3D Printing The Good And The Bad

© Formlabs 2012

Are 3D printers about to start printing themselves in a flurry of robotic replication? No. Not yet. Are they about to spread throughout our homes like a virus and nest in the rear of two-dollar stores, pumping out millions of useless plastic objects that quickly end up as landfill, ocean junk or mistaken for food by millions of birds? Maybe, but not yet.

Suffice to say that the above mentioned scenarios are not in our near future. But with Moore's Law being a fair indication that anything to do with technology improves exponentially each year, we can be sure that 3D printing technology will be a more refined, complex and ubiquitous beast sooner than any cautious legislations may be put in place.

Commercial 3D printers have been around since 1994, but their development is gaining momentum, with sales projected to jump 2 billion in 4 years. To give you an idea of how fast things are moving:

• A $2200 printer will soon be superseded by a $347 model that will print at the same resolution
• A drone plane that cost $250,000 to build can now have all it's parts printed for $2000

So print out your hover boards boys and girls 'cause you're gonna need them to keep up!

What exactly is 3D Printing?

3D printers use one of two technologies: Stereolithography and Plastic Extrusion. Stereolithography, developed in 1986, uses a laser to cure a liquid resin. Plastic extrusion, the most common desktop printer technology, melts plastic and uses an extruder to print each layer of a 3D object with the molten plastic. Desktop 3D printers cost from $200 to $25,000, with a decent printer averaging around $2000. There are over 100 printers to choose from. Beyond the desktop printers, the largest printer to date is the D-Shape printer which can print structures up to 6x6 meters.

How does it work?

3D printed pen holder, from 3D model to finished product.

Firstly, you need a 3D model. 3D models can be created using free online software, such as Tinkercad and SketchUp, and pre-made files can be shared and downloaded from Thingiverse. Or you can scan a real object (your xbox camera is a scanner that can do this). The 3D model file is converted to a format that slices the 3D model into many fine layers. The printer then prints these layers, one at a time, one on top of the other, to create the 3D object, which can be hard or flexible and can even include moving parts.

Supportive scaffolding is automatically printed in hollow areas for structures like domes, which is then scraped or dissolved away. The objects can then be refined using various methods of smoothing, coating, painting and sealing.

What materials are used?

3D printers can print with a variety of materials:

• Plastics
• Bioplastics
• Ceramic powders
• Metals (including wiring, but not circuitry)
• Wood-like materials
• Human cells
• Chocolate!

Desktop printers use ABS and PLA thermoplastics. PLA plastics are biodegradable, in that they degrade under UV light. (Not sure if these objects still degrade in the darkness of landfill?) They are a cheaper and more eco-friendly material, but provide a less refined finish.

What can be printed now?

Here's a list of what's been achieved to date:

• A beating mouse heart
• Customised braces
• A prosthetic face
• 75% of a man’s skull
• Plastic bird beaks
• Doctors 3D-printed an emergency airway tube that saved a 20-month old baby boy’s life
• Toy makers, collaborating from opposite ends of the globe, made a robotic hand for a boy in South Africa
• Scientists printed a functional ear from 3d printed cells and nanoparticles, embedded with electronics as it grew, creating a ‘bionic' ear, can receive radio signals beyond human capability (not attachable to a human though - yet)
• Other functional living tissues containing a network of vessel-like tubes that can be pumped full of nutrients and oxygen so the tissue grows like a live tissue
• All the parts for a working gun, The Liberator
• Chocolate!

Current limitations:

They're slow. It took 20 minutes to print my amazeballs pen holder (shown above). With 20+ of us in the class, and only 6 printers, that took a couple of hours. Several attempts ended up producing an object that looked like an imploded mesh. You wouldn't want that to be the emergency wind pipe you were gasping twenty minutes for. In other parts of the world, doctors took one to two days to print a large section of a patient’s skull. That may seem a long wait but then you probably have time to kill if you're missing a large part of your skull.

Also, Desktop printers require a lot of tinkering and calibrating, with issues of the materials cooling at different rates and warping. Large industrial machines are like ovens, so the desktop printer you might use at home will need to be kept out of drafts and at a temperature that is consistent throughout the machine.

And up until now, they really haven't looked that sexy. More recent models, like the Form One (shown above), are kinda hot (for a machine). Their predecessors look like anorexic microwaves with their mechanical guts protruding like wiry ribs. Not desk-top hot.

What is being developed?

• Human skin for grafting onto burn victims
• Replacement heart valves
• Kidney, pancreas and bone grafts
• Water purification devices
• A printer that can print the flasks and tubes to perform chemistry, and then squirt the chemicals into these objects that react with the chemicals, all in a carefully orchestrated process to create a drug
• A printer that works in zero-gravity for the peeps in the space station so they don't have to wait for dodgy Russian rockets to deliver parts
• Combining 3D printing and electrical stimulation of muscle tissue to print and grow an edible meat product (can you imagine McDonalds salivating over that one?)
• And probably more weapons

How might 3D printing affect the world?

• Developers of the fake meat product claim that 99% less land, 96% less water and 45%less energy would be used than farming livestock (mmm, fake meat)
• Printing replaces many tools, and the production of those tools, saving time, resources and energy
• People can print what they need, when they need it, rather than products being manufactured en masse, using energy and resources to transport across the world, to sit idle for months on a store shelves
• Some manufacturing industries are in danger of completely disappearing within 25 years
• Advances in medical equipment and procedures, prosthetics, tissue engineering
• More plastic rubbish 
• Little Johnny, obese from all those fake burgers, prints a gun and assembles it using his Lego skills, and shoots little Sally because she annoyed him
• Me printing copious amounts of chocolate!

What's driving the development of this technology?

• The US Defence Department has invested millions in researching how to develop weapon parts and medical products to assist it's soldiers
• The medical industry
• Younger generations experimenting with what they can print and how to make better printers

And soon to join the foray, once these devices look more Fisher Price than Frankenstein, will be your kids, smashing out whatever they can dream up on their iPad.

Realities:

A printer in every home:

Once the hobby-ho fun has worn off, a printer in the home will only really be useful if it can print things we need a constant supply of - toilet paper, toothpaste, meat, and chocolate! It’s more likely print-labs will pop up, like those DVD kiosks that appeared between us and the DVD store. They could offer the service of printing from their file library, or from a file you send to them, utilising small-scale manufacturing facilities. Then again, one shouldn’t underestimate the potential of having a never ending supply of Lego pieces printed to order. As a grown man I can't admit to being excited by that, but it excites me for my children (that I don't have, but if I did).

Printers reproducing themselves:

A printer has been used to reproduce its parts. But before we get all Terminator-fearing, we must remember the printer would then need to be able to assemble itself and access power and more printing materials, to be any apocalyptic threat. If, like me, you like allowing your imagination to stretch a little, it's really not that hard to imagine existing technology coming together to facilitate this nightmare. However, coming back to realty, and remembering the (as-yet) unrealised fears in the early 2000s that the internet would become a super consciousness and control us all, does help keep things in perspective.

Printing meat:

Recent advances promise, after some rigorous testing, that the production of edible products is more than likely. Getting past the mentality of eating something processed is probably not a problem when you consider we already eat highly processed and genetically modified foods. Getting the taste and texture right to make these faux-patties marketable is going to be the ‘cattle guard’.

My beef:

It's exciting to focus on how this technology will make our lives better, how it will affect existing business and the economy, and how it will reduce the impact on the environment. There is no denying the medical marvels that have already blessed the recipients. But just like the technology that gives us the environmentally-friendly idea of a paper-less office also leaves a swathe of destruction and resource-drain behind it, there is always a flip side. As quality, complexity and speed improve, what will be printed in the nasty little hands of your enemy in a fit of rage could be hard to handle. Even now, when someone pulls out what looks like a plastic gun, you may be just as concerned as if it looked like a metal one. Like file piracy, people are going to produce and share printable files that, even though common sense will say we shouldn’t, futile laws will fail to stop.

One thing is for sure: there is no stopping the run-away train of technology, which may very well be an omen for 3D printers and a metallic menagerie of different machines replicating beyond our control before suitable control mechanisms are in place. But not yet.

Like the smart phone and tablet, even though we didn’t need 3D printers, we now have them, and it’s likely that we’ll soon be wondering how we ever lived without them. The excitement and concerns match those that accompanied the emerging internet. In fact, this may be the beginning of a '3D internet', where everything and anything can be explored, shared and downloaded to emerge fully formed, freed from the restrains of the 2D web page. Hopefully some clever cat will develop a sharable file so we can all download a little more common sense. However, if the percentage of time spent on porn sites is any indication, that kind of intelligence might more likely end up focused on printing a sex-bot (including moving parts).