Apr. 9, 2015
Autodesk today announced that its 3D printing investment fund has invested $10 million in Carbon3D. Carbon3D first unveiled its technology on-stage at TED conference last month with an entirely new breakthrough 3D printing process which is 25-100 times faster than other 3D printing processes on the market.
Current layer-by-layer 3D printing technology is slow and often produces parts that are mechanically weak due to their shale-like layers. On its site, Carbon3D writes:
3D printing has struggled to deliver on its promise to transform manufacturing. Prints take forever, parts are mechanically weak, and material choices are far too limited. That's because current 3D printing technology is really just 2D printing, over and over again.
CLIP — Continuous Liquid Interface Production — is a breakthrough technology that grows parts instead of printing them layer by layer. CLIP allows businesses to produce commercial quality parts at game-changing speeds, creating a clear path to 3D manufacturing.
The technology works by harnessing light and oxygen to continuously grow objects from a pool of resin instead of printing them layer-by-layer. By carefully balancing the interaction of UV light, which triggers photo polymerization, and oxygen, which inhibits the reaction, CLIP continuously grows molecularly solid objects from a pool of resin at speeds of up to 100 times faster than conventional 3D printing technology.
In a release, Autodesk said its $100 million Spark Investment Fund is aimed at "entrepreneurs, innovators, and startups who push the boundaries of 3D printing."
"We started the Spark Investment Fund to help drive the 3D printing industry forward," said Carl Bass, Autodesk president and CEO. "Carbon3D embodies the innovation that's required to change how products are made. The incredible speed of its CLIP technology makes 3D printing accessible for true manufacturing, beyond the prototyping and the one-offs we see it being used for now."
Carbon3D is a Silicon Valley based company and was founded in 2013 in Chapel Hill, NC. "We're honored to have an industry powerhouse like Autodesk recognize the transformative nature of our CLIP technology and engage with us in such a significant way," said Dr. Joseph DeSimone, CEO and co-founder, Carbon3D.
The company expects to release its first industrial machine within the next 12 months.
Posted in 3D Printing Company
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Tom You missed the point. It's about speed, 6 mins to print what my printer does in 4 hours, is pretty dam impressive!! It is also very very scalable, add resins and polymers into the mix and the material selection goes trough the roof.
Marcello Bob wrote at 4/10/2015 5:28:20 PM:
except they patented the CLIP process...
Tom wrote at 4/9/2015 5:03:04 PM:
soo much marketing BS. Their innovation is stopping the resin sticking to the window, a unique bit of engineering sure, but not exactly revolutionary. From reading the article it sounds like they invented the whole inverted SLA process. It will still suffer from workspace limitations of other dlp inverted SLA machines, and it will take all of a weekend for the likes of form1 to integrate the same approach into their machines.
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