China3D printingNet March 26th,InkbitDeveloped a highly accurate and intelligent polymer printing method. It is a branch of MIT and has just announced its first3D printingThe commercial release of Vista.Now, the company has announced that it has received a $1.7 million Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract from the United States Air Force (USAF), which will enable Inkbit to build three bases for the United States USAF.3D printingsystem.
These three machines will be one of the first commercial machines produced by the startup, and the first is expected to be used by the Texas National Guard. Colonel Alex Goldberg, Chief Innovation Officer of the Texas Air National Guard, said in the news: “The Texas National Guard is honored to be the leader in the National Guard’s adoption of additive manufacturing technology. We are very pleased to adopt DARPA, etc. The technology developed by the agency to start the production of expeditionary parts will greatly reduce the cost of the entire force.”
Inkbit’s proprietary Visual Control Jet (VCJ) is an inkjet polymer3D printingTechnology, it relies on machine vision and learning to achieve closed-loop real-time feedback control. This means that Inkbit 3D printingThe opportunity will scan every layer and every voxel during deposition. If there is a difference between the required geometry and the printed content, the machine will automatically adjust the next layer to compensate. Then, all data collection allows the machine to learn from errors and perform appropriate adjustments to resolve any problems that may arise, such as shrinkage or warpage.
Inkbit co-founder and CEO Davide Marini said: “We want the machine to be used on the factory floor. Of course, it can also be used for prototyping, but the beauty is that users can simultaneously perform rapid prototyping on the same machine. And mass production. It is a multi-material machine in itself because we have chosenVistaAs our platform. “
The ability to scan each layer during a print job brings some novel advantages.For example, machine vision can3D printingThe parts are merged into other printing objects, and the system can identify foreign objects and make appropriate adjustments. In addition, the system does not require a method of scraping the ink from the rolling mechanism. For typical inkjet printers, this is the case. In the inkjet printing process, each layer of the photopolymer is flattened by the inkjet printer. So it is.The vision system cancels this mechanism, thus opening up the traditional inkjet3D printingVarious materials that are usually not available in the machine.
Currently, almost all of them are used3D printingAll of the photosensitive polymers are based on acrylate or contain acrylate ingredients, but Vista can use catalytic curing materials (such as engineering-grade resins such as epoxy resins) for printing. In the printing process using traditional inkjet machines, the resin adheres to the rollers used to flatten each layer and slowly solidify, eventually causing the machine to jam. In stereolithography or digital light processor, acrylate is used to initiate and terminate the polymerization reaction, otherwise the entire barrel will polymerize.
Using polymers such as epoxy resin3D printingThe ability to produce parts with higher durability and chemical resistance that acrylates cannot achieve. One application Marini offers is the production of fluid manifolds, which can be flushed with strong chemicals such as aggressive acids or alkalis. Vista can also print with materials that will not degrade when exposed to ultraviolet light, which is a notorious problem that usually involves printing 3D parts with photopolymers.
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Inkbit Vista 3D printingmachine. Image courtesy of Inkbit.
Vista is a system called Multi-Fab developed by Wojciech Matusik’s MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), developed by a group of researchers including Javier Ramos.The machine is unique because it uses machine vision to scan each layer of printing, which not only enables accuracy and precision to reach a new level, but also embeds unprinted components in3D printingIn the parts.
When Inkbit was spun off in 2017, Matusik became CTO and Ramos hardware director. Marini just emerged from the head of another MIT startup called Firefly BioWorks and sold it to Abcam. And Multi-Fab became Inkbit’s first prototype. The company rebuilt the system to the zero version, and after many iterations to realize the Vista machine.The changes to the printer include changes to its architecture, which previously caused the print head to move on a fixed bed, similar to traditional inkjet3D printingmachine. Because the company aims to make an industrial-grade machine with multiple materials, the team knew that the printing hardware around the print bed would be too heavy. Inkbit, in turn, decided to keep the print block still, and then move the print bed back and forth underneath. In addition, a veteran from Stratasys (who later participated in the $12 million investment in this startup with DSM) pointed out that the framework needs to be stronger, otherwise the system will have accuracy problems.
The next major design change is an improved machine vision system based on optical coherence tomography completed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). This technology relies on an interferometer to generate images with micron resolution from an optical scattering medium. However, despite the complexity of the system, Marini said it would make Vista too expensive.“The decision was redesigned purely for cost considerations. We did not want to bring a too expensive machine to the market. For Vista, we developed a more traditional vision system based on triangulation. It is still completely owned by us.”
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