Canon aims to make impact in 3D printer market - royflut1991

If Canyon were to use its prototype 3D printer to print components for production models, Repp-Rap style, customers might see IT a runty faster.

Canon claims, after all, that its new 3D printing engineering leave exist moral enough for rapid manufacturing, additionally to the rapid prototyping for which many businesses already use 3D printing.

However, while the company showed off samples printed with the prototype at Canon Expo, an event for its customers in Paris this week, the machine itself was a no-show. It's still somewhere in Japan, faculty said, and is probably leastwise deuce years from commercialisation.

Although it doesn't yet make its ain 3D printers, Canon already sells them: Two years ago it began reselling models from 3D Systems in Japan, entering the European market in February this twelvemonth.

3D Systems holds identify patents on a figure of printing technologies. The most familiar of those technologies, and the one most commonly old in hobbyist printers, is amalgamate deposit printing process, in which a thermoplastic resin material is heated until it melts and then piped like cake icing, stratum on top of stratum, until the model is complete. Some of the 3D Systems printers Canon sells for rapid prototyping work in this way.

Canon drew a large crew at its event with demonstrations of two of the 3D Systems printers it resells that use other printing technologies. One involves sprinkling powdered material onto a platform, layer by layer, melting parts of it with a laser so they solidify and attach themselves to the former layer as they coolheaded, the other builds the mannikin in an ever-deepening bath of molten polymer, curing the layer on the surface with an ultraviolet light ready to solidify IT. The finished models are well removed from the powder or smooth for cleaning.

Reselling other society's printers is non enough though, according to Canon Europe's 3D printer selling manager, Ryan Milne.

"Customers want to come across we are delivery our have technology to market," He said.

That's where Canon's prototype comes in, although it could be 2 geezerhood operating theater more before information technology goes on sales event.

"When IT comes to market, we want information technology to make an impact," Alan Alexander Milne aforementioned. Don't expect to reckon information technology in your local avocation store, though: It leave in spades be aimed at professionals and industrial users, atomic number 2 said.

Canyon

An image of a image 3D pressman being developed by Canon, captured from a company promotional video released in October 2015

The printer Canyon is developing uses a new printing process method involving lamination, employees at the expo said, without providing further details.

An brio in a Canon encouragement video appears to show it printing the layers of an object on an individual basi, then joining them together — unlike existing fused deposition devices, which impress unweathered layers directly happening top of present ones.

Milne wouldn't comment happening the lamination. The printer will be about as improbable as him, about 1.8 meters, he said, and testament print in resin, with water-water-soluble supports.

It's hard to gauge from those clues what the device's print mass could be: the largest output sample presented, consisting of two toothy wheels, was 50 millimeters in diam and 12 millimeter alto. The pieces looked almost as though they had been injectant molded. They weren't A silky and slick as, say, an Apple iPhone accessory, but you could well imagine them turn smoothly inside a machine requiring some precision, so much every bit an inkjet printer.

Precision and surface finish are ii features Canon says the printer leave improve on, reducing the need for secondary processing of printed objects.

Canyon too claims it will be able to print a wide variety of materials, including polypropene (PP), polythene (PE), polyoxymethylene (POM) or acetal, polymeric amide (Nylon), and polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA), the polymer in use to make Plexiglas or Lucite. Its printed samples included materials dark-coloured black, diluted, red and aristocratic, and materials IT said rich person commanding clumsiness, transparency, snap, flexibility or impact resistance. If it's able to print a singular object composed of several of those, then short-track down or custom manufacturing could so be sure a shake-sprouted. Researchers at MIT have already created a one-turned 3D printer that can build with ten incompatible materials at once.

Away the time Canon's printer is ready for market, though, information technology's likely that 3D Systems and others leave have come up with new ways to print too.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/424020/canon-aims-to-make-impact-in-3d-printer-market.html

Posted by: royflut1991.blogspot.com

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