AMAZING TECHNOLOGY 3D PRINTING CAN NOW PRINT OBJECTS IN ONE TO TWO SECONDS

3D printers are useful devices for all kinds of reasons, but most have a critical weakness: they simply take a long time to actually make anything. That’s because additive manufacturing generally works by putting down an object one microscopic layer at a time. But a new holographic printing technique makes it possible to create the entire thing at once — in as little as a second or two. Light-based 3D printing techniques generally use lasers to cause a layer of resin to harden in a pattern, but like extrusion printers, they have to do it layer by layer. If the laser shined all the way through the liquid resin, it would cause a big line of it to cure. But what if you shined multiple weaker lasers through the resin, none of which was powerful enough to cure it except when they all intersected? That’s the technique developed by a team led by researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. This basic idea has been applied in several other domains: by carefully overlapping weak beams of light, sound or radiation, you can expose a chosen volume to a critical amount while leaving other areas largely untouched. In this case, the three beams of light must be carefully patterned to only intersect with each other and produce that constructive interference in the exact points that need to solidify. And once that pattern is set, it only takes a handful of seconds to actually complete the process of curing the resin — drain it away and your object is ready to use.You also could quickly print multiple structures simultaneously