Volumetric 3D Printing

UC Berkeley Graduate Student - August 2020 to May 2021

I completed a master’s capstone project that expanded upon the 3D Volumetric Printing called CAL developed by Professor Hayden Taylor. CAL projects images onto a rotating vat of resin to cure the resin into a 3D print. This system has the potential to bring 3D printing to mass manufacturing, as it drastically decreases the time needed to 3D print objects.

The current mechanism is small for manufacturing standards, so I developed a scale-up design of this mechanism in Fusion 360.

Previously, the resin container rotated while the projector remained stationary. The hindrance for simply enlarging the original design is that the curing process cannot begin until the resin in the container has reached the same angular speed. The time needed to do so increases with an increase in container size.

I proceeded with a mechanism that rotates the projector around a stationary vat. Therefore, the mechanism no longer needs to wait to start projecting for the resin to settle into rotating at a constant angular momentum.

To rotate the mechanism, a pulley is attached to a circular track that circumnavigates a CNCed sprocket. To ensure the belt would not slip off the sprocket, it is made of two halves with an outer lip that bolts together.

A rack frame lies on top of the sprocket to carry and move the projector vertically. The vertical movement is made possible by a vertical linear actuator and three vertical undriven linear rails.

The projector’s distance away from the container can also be adjusted to allow this mechanism to be used with different sizes of vats.

It was not possible to assemble and test the mechanism during my master's, as the project was completed entirely online due to safety precautions taken to reduce the spread of COVID-19.

I designed a poster that displayed 3 different individual projects in relation to CAL 3D Printing, which was presented at an online student exhibition in May 2021.

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