Electric3DPrinter

Electric 3D Printer

This describes my work on my invention of an electric 3D printer with no moving parts.

This started out as a blog post on the RepRap Ltd website, but it soon became unwieldy, and so I moved it here.

The Idea

This combines three ideas to make a fourth. The three are:

1. The reverse-CT scan 3D printing technique from Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore,
2. The open-source electric 3D scanning technique for 3D reconstruction from Spectra, and
3. Electropolymerisation.

My overall synthesis of the three is to use an electric current to make a liquid plastic monomer polymerise to a solid in such a way that it forms a 3-dimensional object with a specified shape, and to do that with a single scan in a time of (I hope…) a few seconds. Let me start by describing the three precursor technologies in more detail: